Despicable Me 4 exists because its five big-screen siblings—three direct predecessors and two Minions-focused prequels—made the franchise the most lucrative in animated-cinema history. Pretending there’s a creative reason for continuing the series is foolhardy, and Chris Renaud’s sequel offers no reason to think there’s anything more than a profit motive at play here.
Continuing the tale of bald, oddly shaped Gru and his clan of human and yellow compatriots, this surefire summer blockbuster, premiering July 3, doesn’t break with formula but, more problematically, also fails to devise a story of any substance of purpose aside from staging more juvenile Minions mayhem. Kids will undoubtedly chuckle at their familiar exploits; the rest will view the film as an excuse to take a nice air-conditioned nap.
Reformed supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) is still working for the Anti-Villain League, and his latest assignment is infiltrating his school reunion at Lycee Pas Bon in order to nab his childhood arch nemesis Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell), a French rogue sporting curled-back hair and a puffy green coat with a bushy fur collar. Maxime and his icy girlfriend Valentina (Sofia Vergara) waste no time picking on their old classmate.
Yet the joke is on them when Gru reveals that he’s working for the other side and intent on apprehending Maxime. The problem with that mission, however, is that Maxime has turned himself into a nearly indestructible human-cockroach hybrid, and it takes the efforts of every last Anti-Villain League agent to take him down—at which point the baddie threatens to exact revenge against Gru and his loved ones.
Back at home, Gru reunites with wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) and adopted adolescents Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan), all of whom give him a warmer greeting than the reception he receives from his baby boy Gru Jr., who recoils and scowls at his dad with comical cruelty.
Before Gru can figure out a way to forge a harmonious father-son bond, he’s notified by former boss Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) that Maxime has escaped from maximum security prison. In response, Gru and his clan enter witness protection at a high-tech safehouse in the town of Mayflower, where they assume new identities and struggle to fit into their swanky environs. Unsurprisingly, this is a particularly arduous task for awkward Gru, who strains to befriend posh neighbor Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert), culminating in a tennis match at a country club that’s marked by the mischievous interference of the Minions.
A flashback elucidates that Maxime’s hatred of Gru stems from a 9th-grade talent show incident involving a performance of Culture Club’s “Karma Chameleon,” and that reference is one of many (including nods to Captain America, The Terminator, and Spider-Man 2) that are aimed squarely at adult-chaperone viewers. Such token gestures resonate as obligatory, forced, and random, and they’re far less inspired than the film’s immature antics. Most of those have to do with the gibberish-spouting Minions, three of whom accompany Gru, Lucy, and their brood to Mayflower while the rest are sent to Anti-Villain League headquarters, where some are given super serums and transformed into Mega Minions with powers comparable to Plastic Man, Cyclops, the Thing, Superman, and the Hulk.
The Mega Minions are Despicable Me’s sole novelty, and Mike White and Ken Daurio’s script does very little with them; aside from a single set piece, they’re footnotes to the action proper. More successful are the average Minions’ routine shenanigans, be it billboarding each other when they’re sleeping, getting stuck in a vending machine, becoming encased in a giant Jello mold, and caring for Gru Jr. (changing his diaper, brushing his teeth, sticking a pacifier in his mouth) with the efficiency of a NASCAR pit crew. The Minions’ choice moments are virtually stand-alone bits, and at times, it seems like director Chris Renaud would have been better off wholly tossing Gru aside in favor of his diminutive banana-hued dorks, whose prattling and cackling props up the ho-hum narrative.
Speaking of which, Despicable Me 4’s plot is split between Maxime’s plot to kidnap Gru Jr. and make him his own cockroach-y son, and Gru’s simultaneous stabs at socializing with the locals and helping Perry’s teen daughter Poppy (Joey King) steal Lycee Pas Bon’s honey badger mascot because she thinks such a daring heist will secure her admission to the school. Like the rest of the film’s subplots, this thread results in frantic sequences that the director stages with rubbery zip and flair. It also, however, comes across as disconnected from the rest of the material, and generates scant laughs, even from the rambunctious and ravenous honey badger.
With the franchise’s cartoony characters now fully established and Gru having already fought multiple colorful supervillains, Despicable Me 4 spins its wheels with perfunctory hijinks devoid of any larger meaning. So paper-thin are these proceedings that they don’t bother dispensing a life lesson of any sort, and though it’s difficult to complain about Renaud eschewing preachiness in favor of pure, undiluted silliness, he can’t invigorate this half-hearted venture. Neither can the film’s cast; Carell, Wiig, and the rest of their co-stars are all as lively as one might expect, but there’s minimal freshness to their vocal performances. Not helping matters is that their one-liners are as leaden as the scenarios in which they find themselves.
After six feature outings as well as numerous shorts and TV specials, it’s no shock that the series is running on fumes. It’s not like Despicable Me 4 is outright objectionable; rather, it’s simply a disposable adventure that maintains its ancestors’ energy but lacks its wit and its heart—the two qualities that, at outset, distinguished Gru and their Minions from their myriad computer-generated brethren. The pre-tween set will have fewer of these complaints than their grown-up counterparts, and there’s something to be said for the fact that the film hits its marks with enough aplomb to keep its target viewers reasonably satisfied (or, at least, temporarily distracted). Yet considering its inferiority to its precursors, it nonetheless feels like Illumination and Universal’s cash cow is about ready to be put out to pasture.
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