Whatever You’re Expecting, Despicable Me 4 Is Worse
Illumination has engineered a bulletproof animated children’s brand in the Minion-maddening Despicable Me franchise. Steve Carell’s cantankerous Gru could play Whac-A-Mole with his yellow pill-shaped sidekicks for 90 minutes and bank a billion dollars internationally. Despicable Me 4 is somehow worse than that hypothetical, and will no doubt pack sold-out theaters filled with screaming toddlers jonesing for their next banana-flavored hit. What feels like a collection of in-universe shorts is Scotch-taped together into Gru’s latest sequel, the lowest, squishy-rotten hanging fruit on the children’s animation tree—and I say that having suffered through a nearly fatal case of the Mondays from The Garfield Movie barely a month ago.
Carell returns to voice supervillain turned Anti-Villain League agent Felonious Gru for at least one more sweet, over-the-moon paycheck. It’s a full-on family reunion with Gru’s adopted daughters (Madison Polan, Dana Gaier, Miranda Cosgrove), his wife Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig) and the newest addition, Gru’s first biological child, the scowling and pointy-nosed Gru Jr. (like father, like son). Gru’s latest AVL assignment pits him against French-accented supervillain Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell), an adversary from his supervillain school days at Lycée Pas Bon. Maxime’s cockroach obsession allows for an effortless jailbreak, which sends Gru’s clan into AVL’s agent protection program. It’s Gru vs. Maxime as the story’s heavyweight showdown, but also Gru vs. Gru Jr. (winning his love), Gru vs. adolescent villain-in-training Poppy Prescott (Joey King), and other shortsighted tangents stuffed between braindead “Three Stooges but Minions” vignettes.
Despicable Me 4 suffers from an aimless, wastefully inconsequential approach that doesn’t seem possible from co-writer Mike White (School of Rock but also The Emoji Movie). Shiny objects often punctuate children’s entertainment, and dumb-as-rocks gags keep short attention spans in check, but this sequel is guilty of motoring through isolated skits without clever distractions or attention-worthy humor. Director Chris Renaud is a shell of himself compared to his work in Despicable Me, a family-friendly do-gooder that at least understood how to develop introductory character arcs. Despicable Me 4 loses focus like a golden retriever in a Petco plushie aisle, splitting characters into bottled subplots that can only be addressed in single-file order. Renaud’s narrative command is littered with non sequiturs and short-term memory loss, failing even the rudimentary franchise mechanics of “Gru + Minions + Cute = Haha.”
Two primary plotlines tangle into an ineffective hodgepodge of zappy gadgets and expired juvenile humor that’s impossible to care about. Gru’s rivalry against Ferrell’s French-for-no-reason criminal influences some seismic storytelling shifts…only to be backburned until continuity begs for another thrust forward. Gru’s fatherhood insecurities about the infant boy who loves mama more is a dull evolution given how the filmmakers forget how payoffs are worth zilch if there’s no investable buildup. Storytelling milestones exist here, but there’s no resonating impact—everything happens for the sake of viral sequelitus. Gru busily becomes Poppy’s mentor overnight. Gru’s family is strictly instructed to stay hidden, but that’s unimportant scenes later. There’s a weird karate school confrontation that feels like a discarded, bite-sized special feature and, even more bizarre, an underbaked “Mega Minion” side quest. Renaud’s oblivious to the cacophony of mindless Despicable Me indulgences that, when welded together, summate to a needlessly dense, pointless mass of mini-sodes passing as all-ages creative abandon.