Four official movies and two Minions spinoffs in, the world introduced in Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud’s animated 2010 comedy Despicable Me somehow still has enough steam to power its setting. There’s inherently a lot of narrative and comedic potential in a world where supervillains have networking conventions and schools for aspiring young evildoers, and they treat being a Big Bad like a day job.
But Despicable Me 4 suffers from a weird problem: This world has too much potential. Instead of focusing on just a few threads, Renaud and the rest of the filmmakers try to tackle a bunch of different plotlines without exploring any of them fully — or even connecting them in any meaningful way.
[Ed. note: This review contains slight setup spoilers forDespicable Me 4.]
Despicable Me 4 kicks off with supervillain turned family man Gru (Steve Carell) and his family going into witness protection after cockroach-themed villain Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) escapes maximum security prison. With Maxime, who just happens to be Gru’s high school rival, coming after him, Gru and his wife and apparently never-aging children assume false identities as the Cunninghams, a perfectly normal family living in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood. Meanwhile, Maxime and his aloof femme-fatale girlfriend, Valentina (Sofía Vergara), hunt Gru down in a giant cockroach-themed aircraft. Oh, and a few of the Minions get superpowers.
All these threads have a lot to explore: Any one of them could be fleshed out into a load-bearing primary plot. But instead, every single possible hook is simply glossed over. None of them are given enough time to develop into something actually compelling, or with enough connective tissue to hold the moving parts together.
And there are even more subplots strung throughout the movie. The family’s preppy preteen neighbor Poppy Prescott (Joey King) is actually an aspiring supervillain who admires Gru and blackmails him into helping her achieve supervillain
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