While “Despicable Me 4” will not compete for any accolades, those who enjoy this genre will find it entertaining. Funny, isn’t it? The more absurd and nonsensical the joke, the more I found myself amused and, yet, still being the more restrained member of the audience. The children I went with were apparently rolling with laughter.
At times, all one can see is the sight of a young father acting foolishly as he tries to slip the sock on his son’s feet and pretends that he has missed it repeatedly and shouts ‘Whoops’ each time. He was first introduced in the original made in 2010; it is Gru, the ex villain, who now fights villains but has ‘dad’ qualities and is really an inspirational figure who is a dad and tries to make being a dad his career. The next character, Silly Daddy, is an ex supervillain and is at his best while pulling off funny moves purposely or while making a fool of himself unintentionally.
This one, which was directed by Chris Renaud (most famous for directing the first two films in the series and ‘The Secret Life of Pets’ films), feels stitched together but I do not mean it in the lazy or inattentive sense of the word, I mean it in the very political sense that ‘We are making the type of comedy which grabs a cluster of things we think are amusing and pushes them together through thin strands of storyline. While the end product has both hits and misses, we can still say the end product is funny in a cheeky way most of the time.
It is a movie which is akin to either a very decent Mike Myers or Will Ferrell movie, in the sense of being somewhat like the Peter Sellers Temple of Doom Inspector Clouseau (you knew they would spend about five minutes in a slapstick karate fight) or the late period of the Marx Brothers, when the “boys” were nearly sixty and let stuntmen do most of it but you still laughed, because everyone knew where the punches were expected to be thrown.
In this film, Will Ferrell is cast as a villain, cranking up the obnoxiousness as Maxime Le Mal, a Frenchman who studied at Lycée Pas Bon, a high school of some importance to Gru, the supervillain protagonist (think Supervillain Hogwarts). Maxime hated Gru because all these years he has focused on a minor grievance from the past when Gru embarrassed him during the school’s talent presentation. Few unflattering things, such as him attending a class reunion, fan the flames of his fury. At this gathering, he announces to all who would listen (with his girlfriend Valentina in tow voiced by Sofia Vergara) that he will take his revenge on Gru by undergoing genetic engineering to transform himself into a cockroach man. What happens next is almost laughable, Grue gets himself arrested, thrown into supervillain prison, breaks out and rejoins with Valentina and an army of tiny cockroaches in tiny army helmets all hell bent on retribution against Gru, Lucy (his wife played by Kristen Wiig), their sweet children, and the newborn baby, Gru Jr. whom the new Gru instinctively despises, declaring war on daddy and denying all offers of goodwill.
In fact, it is the ending that was precisely predictable from the beginning.
Grue’s wife now is a fictional character of film ‘Curtain’ and he moves with his family to a middle class neighborhood that is full with big houses and gives them dramatic names. Why, it’s explained, Gru is an alleged solar power pug and Lucy is a fake oligarch hairdresser. The scene tries to introduce a concept of a silent but sinister non-Southern crook who is a wild a wildbear rather than to be intrigued by what Maxime and Valentina are up to towards the closing moments of the film. This method, unfortunately, makes the various pranks involving Gru and Maxime rather dull.
Of course, Lucy performs miracles beyond this, including a case of ambush where a rich no-bra American is induced to flee abuse in a supermarket, citing muscle memory comparable to T-1000 in Terminator 2: Judgment Day (of course, the quotation is from Brad Fiedel’s score). It is frightening and grotesque like early Simpsons. Remembers a capitalist idiocy animated advertising and numerous instances of cultural America. In the supermarket, kids can scour the cereals aisle with products like Skinny Bits, Fluffy or the Atomic Sugar Bombz. Some fashion exposing trends of suburbia, modern fashion, and botox are parodied, which might get some parents terrified.
In the film, new main characters can be suggested, including a neighbor teen Poppy Prescott, played by Joey King, who aims to be a supervillain and brings Gru into a very pathetic plot of stealing a school mascot from his old institution.
There’s a lot more to the film’s story, such as it is. For those who cannot stand the apoplexy which is induced by aggressively uncreative entertainment, know that the plot , which was co written by Ken Daurio and Mike White, is as thin as his physique and aimed at allowing for jokes to be made or provided sequentially. There are times when it feels like White and Daurio are maybe not writing for structure purposes but rather to give the animators and voice actors something to work with that will eventually lead to a bizarre and wild sight gag with strange elements; like in the scene where Gru accidentally stabs himself with a sedative filled syringe on his leg, rides a Minion like a small donkey and uses his own leg as a whip.
Some other very short moments are integrated more to the character, who obviously had a distinctive body language about him and are small, and are somewhat like a single beat added to a chorus in a live action comedy when poppy and her cat get wired up to Dance Dance Revolution or when gary almost gets sucked up by poppy’s giant beanbag chair then crosses his legs in a dainty manner.
Undoubtedly, the Minion army is in pursuit of silliness as well. They’re going all out in the disorderly conduct, like the Three Stooges, frequently falling, teasing, and causing chaos, splattering disgusting substances onto one another while chattering, snickering, and laughing. There is even a part where a leader stands in front of the Minions and addresses concerns about a risky experiment, suggesting someone come forward to volunteer, and the minions standing behind the more forward rows take a step back. The dinosaurs found that one funny.
One curiosity many people have is the question of the necessity of a motion picture. Whatever the question means, if it means anything, this film is not necessary, but is so self congratulating of its not-necessary-ness that you will probably appreciate its calm sense of self. Remain through the end credits and you will witness a panorama of a Minion a cone headed, head twisting supercharged superman who can fly as one of the Minions, mutated X-Men style, coming up from the bottom of the screen, top or sides, stares for a bewildered second, and floats off while mumbling. For this, there were one or two quite small children in the auditorium whose parents had decided to stay and watch. Occasionally, when the conehead Minion’s floating head was not visible, such children laughed in expectation of seeing this shape again.
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