Despicable Me 3

I enjoy watching the Despicable Me movies, though not enough to actually watch them anywhere but planes. 

This one was another enjoyable diversion, though lacked the big heart and emotional pay-offs of the other films. Quite a lot happens at once - Gru is reunited with his brother, who's a good businessman but terrible villain - while also having a vendetta against a new supervillain with an entertaining 80s theme and the voice of Randy Marsh. 

The kids have their own stories - little Agnes is adorable looking for a unicorn while Margo gets accidentally engaged. There's also a new agency boss who seems like a bit of an offensive stereotype to me. Oh, and the minions quit and go on various episodic adventures. Everything comes together for a fun big climax with lots of action and lasers and screaming, and it's definitely enjoyable, but the other films felt like the offered something a bit different and unusual. This one felt like an old direct-to-TV sequel or special extended pilot to kick of a TV series. Still fun, but without offering anything new. 

That said, it’s pretty astonishing to see the worldwide success of this franchise. The Minions seem to really appeal universally, and I see quite a lot of merchandise for them in Japan. This indifferent sequel became only the sixth animated movie to gross more than $1bn worldwide – with Minions being another. It’s in the top 25 highest-grossing films of all time. Pretty crazy, but testament to good marketing and the groundwork lain by a strong, well-made franchise. 

The Secret Life of Pets

There was quite a lot of marketing for The Secret Life of Pets in Japan, and I was tempted to go, but ultimately it wasn’t a must-see, so I let it pass me by. It wasn’t even a priority film to watch on the plane – it only made it to my return journey! Still, it was a fun, simple animated movie that followed a formula and had some entertaining moments.

The plot is more or less Toy Story with pets. When the owners are out, the pets will have fun gatherings and parties. Chubby-faced Jack Russell terrier Max loves his owner very much, though. When a big, tough, brash new dog arrives on the scene, he’s very jealous. That jealousy leads to the two getting lost together, having a lot of scrapes, meeting a lot of rejected pets and ultimately learning to love one another. Yes, the parallels to Toy Story are hard to miss.

Otherwise, it hangs on its characters. Silly fluffy pom Gidget comes close to carrying the movie, by turns adorable, insane and hilarious, but the central duo are mostly on the dull side, the comedy tough-guy rabbit is an overdone joke by this stage and the funny old Pops was an enjoyable character but very one-note.

The film stays entertaining but never tugs at the heartstrings or evokes more than a small chuckle. Bland, derivative and thoroughly mediocre, that doesn’t mean that it’s not a refreshing, inoffensive watch. 

Minions

I must say, though I liked Despicable Me a lot, I’ve been very surprised by the enduring popularity of the minions. They were slightly irritating in the films, though occasionally funny or cute or both. But through popular adulation or the power of forced marketing, they’re ubiquitous, especially in East Asia. In both Japan and Taiwan, there’s a profusion of soft toys of the things, even though I don’t think I’ve ever seen anything else relating to Despicable Me.

So perhaps it made sense to give the minions their own vehicle, which box office numbers show certainly did draw more of an international audience than a new Despicable Me film would have. On the other hand, it’s extremely hard to shift focus fully onto comic relief without making a film with a strong smell of direct-to-video sequel. Minions does not manage to avoid this, at all.

On the other hand, that doesn’t mean this isn’t an enjoyable and silly film, and it being set in London with a lot of familiar locations gave it bonus points for me.

After a prologue showing minions attempting to serve evil figures throughout history, we find out that in the 60s, they were left bereft of a master or mistress. Thus, intrepid minions Kevin, Stuart and Bob set off to find the most despicable being on earth to serve.

At a convention, they discover and win the affections of the wonderfully-named Scarlet Overkill, an American femme fatale with designs on the Crown of England.

The plot as it unfolds is very silly and anything-goes, but that works just fine. But this film can’t hold a candle to Despicable Me or its satisfying sequel. The thing is, those films have a lot of heart, and the minions are just cute comic relief on the edge of that. This film, while fun and silly, is almost bereft of anything you could call heart. There’s no real emotional stakes here, and for that reason, everything stays superficial. That makes this a functional kids’ film that will keep the littlest ones entertained but nothing more.

Despicable Me 2

The first film, even if I more or less ignored it, was a success – and the little minions became very recognisable in pop culture through a whole lot of marketing. So of course a sequel followed – with a spin-off starring those minions apparently planned. Of the many animated films released, Despicable Me seemed to me to suit a sequel well – it finished on a satisfying note, but Gru was left being a father and of course that leads to a whole lot of questions about how his life will be.

And those rich seams are what gets mined here, of course. Gru is a great dad, putting on a real show at his youngest’s birthday party, and the neighbourhood ladies are desperate to set him up with one of their single friends. Meanwhile, he leaves behind his life of crime – until the Anti-Villain League rope him in to be their undercover agent, searching for a mysterious serum that can turn the most innocuous creatures evil and vicious. Of course, Gru is given a female partner  who is a match for him, countering his weaponry and yet also making similar klutzy mistakes.

The two of them are set up in a mall to investigate various suspects, and Gru thinks he recognises El Macho, the brilliantly manly villain thought to have met his end skydiving on a shark into a volcano. (Brilliant.) Investigating his Mexican restaurant, of course Gru’s little daughters encounter El Macho’s suave, floppy-fringed, charming little son, and the eldest has her first crush – much to Gru’s paternal horror. Meanwhile, Gru’s minions seem to be mysteriously disappearing and an old ally who left the fold hopes that Gru will return to his villainous ways in time for the plan to reach fruition.

Like its predecessor, it’s unambitious and straightforward stuff, but very very enjoyable and silly. The minions are more central this time, but remain well-positioned between annoying and cute and don’t outstay their welcome. And once again it’s the fact that Gru himself is so likeable that makes the film work. It’s so easy to root for him and yet to enjoy seeing him make a mess of things as well. Margo, Agnes and Edith, the little girls with old ladies’ names, once again steal many a scene and while the scale of the final setpieces doesn’t quite match going to and shrinking the Moon, in terms of visual complexity it’s extremely impressive.

I laughed far more than I expected to, and actually felt it a shame that many will no doubt dismiss yet another animated sequel as an inferior rehash when if anything, it was more entertaining throughout. Well worth seeing. 

Despicable Me

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.