Bear with me. George Lucas once said audiences never understood the “Star Wars” prequels because his Lucasfilm classics were always meant for kids, not adults. But the truth of the matter is that good storytelling, like the original “Star Wars” movies or classic Pixar movies, works for and engages the hearts and minds of all audiences and not just children. The one exception to the rule might be the sometimes impossibly silly and zany “Despicable Me” franchise which is arguably generally geared at children only with its Minion mania chaos of fart jokes, pratfalls, burps, things that explode in your face, and pandemonium that’s more akin to classic “Tom & Jerry” or “Looney Toons” cartoons without the cleverness or elegance. With that said, given all the family stories growing up with the “Despicable Me,” Illumination Entertainment, the studio behind the series, has debatably tried to engage the adult parent audience a little bit with stories of redemption, love, fatherhood, parenthood, and the responsibilities of keeping your family safe. This takes us to “Despicable Me 4,” a mash-up of the tones not dissimilar to the direction the franchise has been heading in recent years.
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But it’s an extremely overstuffed affair that sometimes makes the film extra trying and tedious. The wackiness often becomes overbearing in these movies, and the various threads clog up the movie and momentum by cramming in so many villains and subplots.
Following up the events of “Despicable Me 3,” with Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) reinstated as the director of the Anti-Villain League, “Despicable Me 4” begins at
the reunion of Lycée Pas Bon School of Villainy Class of ’85, where the former villain Felonious Gru (Steve Carrell) graduated as a child. The school’s evil headmistress is there to announce the alumni of the year, and the award goes to the French antagonist Maxime le Mal (Will Ferrell), one of Gru’s rivals from those younger days.
But it’s a ruse, and Gru, as part of the Anti-Villain League mission, arrests his former noir who has made experiments on himself to take on the characteristics and features of an undefeatable, hard-to-exterminate cockroach (why this strange choice? Who knows). With Maxime apprehended, Gru goes back to his suburban life with his wife, Lucy (Kristen Wiig), and their three adopted children, Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier), and Agnes (Madison Polan). And, of course, there’s a new surprise addition to the film, the Baby, Gru Jr., who seems to favor Mom over Dad despite Gru’s best efforts.
But just as the Gru family settles in for their new chapter of domestic bliss, cranky baby aside, Maxime and his femme fatale girlfriend Valentina (Sofia Veraga, a character that has many ten lines or less throughout the movie and has nothing to do), bust out of jail and vow revenge. Ramsbottom and the AVL decide to put. Gru and the family go into Witness Protection, taking them to a picturesque but anonymous town called Mayflower.
Trying to adjust to their new setting and identities as the Cunningham family, they are rebuffed by their snooty rich neighbors, Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert in full douchebag mode), his wife Patsy Prescott (Chloe Fineman) and their bratty, insolent daughter Poppy Prescott (Joey King).
And this is the point where “Despicable Me” diverges into two stories that seem convoluted. There’s already the main plot, Maxime and Valentina trying to locate where the Gru family is hiding out and destroying them. But things get complicated when Poppy Prescott, an aspiring villain, recognizes who Gru really is seeing through his Chet Cunningham façade. She blackmails him to do her bidding: break into the Lycée Pas Bon School and pull off a heist.
While it all eventually folds back together, the school’s headmistress ratting on the Gru family to Maxime and his evil plans—which contain a gigantic flying cockroach ship to its many whacky elements— the heist section feels like an unwieldy detour. We haven’t even mentioned the Mega Minions. In an effort to protect the Gru family, AVL director Ramsbottom creates a Mega Minion team of superpowered Minions that are essentially a thinly disguised riff of various superheroes like the Fantastic Four’s stretchy Mr. Fantastic, a rocky Thing like a blocky monster, the X-Men’s Cyclops with high powered eye beams, a kind of flying Superman stand-in and a generic strong man (“We’re all sick of superheroes!” someone says at one point, meant to be some kind of meta-reference to superhero saturation, despite indulging in it at the same time, a classic example of wanting to have your critical cake and eat it too).
Directed by Oscar-nominee Chris Renaud and co-director Patrick Delage, and written by Mike White and Ken Daurio, having amassed $4.6 billion across six films, clearly these films entertain and delight audiences worldwide, but “Despicable Me 4” has no emotional center to cling to. And honestly, sometimes its headache-inducing with all the bedlam and mayhem that encircles an already overflowing story that never lets the audience connect with one thing and distracts from the one meaningful element of the film: Gru trying to connect with his son and perhaps also becomes a surrogate father to Poppy (Wiig’s character is almost as disposable to the story as Vegara and the Gru kids don’t have much to do either aside from being potential victims of villainous vengeance).
The Minions in these movies, at least in this edition, are just entirely superfluous to the plot, and there’s almost a version of it that exists without them. Their various madcap and screwball abilities help Gru outwit and escape the various bad guys of the film, Maxime and the Headmistress, but as always, they’re more like convenient plot devices to get characters to get out of jams and have tiny children howl as their anarchic antics.
“Despicable Me 4” is just messy and wearying, even at a scant 95 minutes. And at this point, it seems just to be repeating itself with stories about parenthood that feel a little desperate by adding on a fourth child—cue the pee-pee, poopy, potty jokes to add to the already juvenile humor. “Despicable Me” has essentially outgrown itself, become limited, and somehow needs to evolve. But the way this franchise seems to be unassailable in the eyes of little children and the parents that take them to see it in droves, it doesn’t seem like any of the creators or studios have much incentive to change the often-exhausting formula. But hey, it’ll likely make another mega mint, so there’s that. [C]