Like Megamind and indeed, that target for a pretty unfair amount of
my unjustified hate, Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, I didn’t
go to see Despicable Me because I decided it looked like it was trying
too hard to be funny and probably wasn’t worth watching – at least in the
cinema. Maybe I’d see it in the plane one day, I thought.
But now there’s a sequel – and my friends want to go and see it. So I
thought I’d better see what it was about. And of course, I found it a fair bit
better than I expected it to be. Almost inevitably! Those minions that are pitched as something of a
cross between the alien dolls in Toy Story and the insane Rabbids from Rayman
really saturated the media – then and now, with the sequel – but were a lot less prominent, and therefore a lot less annoying, than I had
expected. And the cheesy but adorable story was cheesy and adorable in all the
right ways.
Despicable Me is centred
on a typical cheesy supervillain called Gru, a cross between Blofeld and the
Penguin, with an easy grasp on evil behaviour and a sinister eastern European
accent. Despite his successes, Gru is considered yesterday’s news. When a
cheeky young upstart villain with a better grip on technology named Vector
steals the Pyramids, Gru knows that the only way to upstage him is to finally
realise his lifelong ambition – to shrink and then steal the Moon itself.
However, when Vector steals the crucial shrink-ray from him just after he
steals it from some Japanese stereotypes, Gru has to enlist the help of three
adorable little orphans with old ladies’ names to help him out. And adopting
those orphans might just change him from a supervillain to a caring father…
Of course, there are heavy doses of cheese and silliness in that story, but
it’s upfront about that from the start. The comedy is broad, with plenty of
slapstick and even toilet humour to get the kids giggling, and of course the
three little girls – the bookish one, the tomboy and the innocent little tot – are
fit to make anybody coo. Those minions, too, with their multilingual babble and
their childish fixations, are likeable too – voiced by the directors, there’s
something very French about the humour they convey, which makes sense since the
bulk of Illumination Pictures grew out of the French Mac Guff animation studio
and the two directors are based there.
What really makes the film work, though, is Gru himself. He’s so dastardly
and then so vulnerable and finally so loyal and loving underneath it all. His
physicality makes for hilarious movements and the juxtaposition of a nasty
villain with three cute little girls makes for some great comedy. Russell Brand
also puts in a very by-the-numbers could-be-anyone performance as a gruff old
mad inventor who facilitates most of Gru’s plans and does the job solidly,
which was a bit of a relief given his usual need to call attention to himself,
and Pharell Williams’ hip-hop-tinged songs fit perfectly.
A film that doesn’t try a whole lot that’s new or different and very much
tries to fit in with other animated films around it, it still does what it sets
out to do very well, and exceeds expectations by being cute, funny and fairly
clever too.
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