Here’s something new in the saga of everysupervillain ordinariness featuring Gru the goofy animated megabaddie (voiced by Steve Carell), with his comedy bald head, pointy noise and foreign accent. We now reach the fourth film in the series; sixth, if you count the two spin-off films about his jabbering yellow sidekick minions.
This franchise from Illumination Entertainment has never come close to the inspired genius of its rival Pixar’s best work, despite the obvious indebtedness to Syndrome from Pixar’s The Incredibles; that mighty film’s influence looks even more obvious now, as Gru and his family have to be moved to a new city and given witness-protection-scheme-type new identities by their faintly exasperated handlers. But it has to be said that the Despicable Me franchise has marathon stamina; it relaxes into its long-established characterisation and storytelling and only a snob would deny this film’s unassuming consistency in delivering family entertainment. And this is, after all, the franchise that gave us the world-beatingly catchy Happy by Pharrell Williams, who returns to write songs for DM4.
The latest crisis in Gru’s life begins with his arrival at a high school reunion at his supervillain alma mater somewhere in francophone Europe; this is the LPB, or Lycée Pas Bon, a castle in the mountains, where the Class of ’85 has assembled. Gru, who has long ago converted to working for the powers of light, confronts a new nemesis: former classmate-slash-implacable-enemy Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell). Maxime has a weapon that turns all mammals into cockroaches – even humans – and when he goes all out to attack Gru and his wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) and stepchildren and baby, the entire family has to be relocated to a new city with fake names. And it is in this new suburban dullness that Gru is discomfited to meet the kid next door: Poppy (Joey King) who has a proposition for him. Meanwhile, Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan), the Anti-Villain League’s Q-type pompous Brit, has developed new bio-tech for evolving the little yellow minions up to a new level of crime-fighting excellence.
In truth, the minions are always the least funny and most tiresome part of the Despicable Me films, but it also has to be said they are undoubtedly an important and mysterious part of the franchise’s success-alchemy and brand identity, providing wacky nonverbal fun, reaching out to very little kids and boosting success in non-English-speaking territories. But there is diversion in Gru and Lucy’s bland new ersatz life in the ’burbs, pretending to be solar panel sales operative Chet and hairstylist Blanche. The film weirdly and rather charmingly begins to resemble an old TV show like Bewitched or I Dream of Jeannie as this family with its heavy burden of secrets tries to make the best of things.
With a terrible inevitability, the awful Maxime turns his cockroach gun on the most poignantly vulnerable members of Gru’s family and a more serious, or even more ironic and cynical film might seek to make the effects of that marginally more scary, more difficult to reverse, more despicable in fact. But this isn’t this film’s style. It isn’t a masterpiece, and no one needs Despicable Me 5, but being unassumingly enjoyable isn’t easy.
• Despicable Me 4 is out in Australia now, in the US on 3 July and in the UK on 12 July.
