When you’re having a bad-bad day and it’s about time that you get your way, one movie will want to make you steamroll whatever you see. Despicable Me 4 brings back more of Pharrell’s lovely music and also happens to have a movie attached to it. The villain-turned-father Gru (Steve Carell) is back for another adventure where he must take on Maxime Le Mal, a French supervillain seeking revenge on Gru over an unresolved conflict in their past. If that sounds interesting, then good. I just made this movie sound much more interesting than it is.
The first Despicable Me movie was my favorite film as a child. Despicable Me 2 was an excellent sequel. However, once the Minions movie came out and earned over $1 billion at the box office, Illumination appears to have lost sight of what makes these movies worth watching. Despicable Me 3 and Minions: The Rise of Gru were not nearly as good, and now Despicable Me 4 delivers more of what made the third movie in this series weak. This is an incoherent sequel without the slightest idea of what to do with its characters. It loses sight of what makes a movie of any genre interesting.
The film starts with Gru attending a high school reunion and facing the villainous Maxime. Firstly, pairing Carell and Ferrell together again is a beautiful idea. These two legendary comedians have been sharing the screen for decades, including the two Anchorman movies, Bewitched, Melinda and Melinda, and even a few episodes of The Office. Ferrell is bringing a tremendous amount of energy to his French-accented role. Carell is also excellent in everything he does. This is his second voice role this year after IF, and they’re very different performances. He steps back into Gru’s shoes quickly.
Soon enough, Gru and his family must go into hiding and assume new identities. This should have been the storyline here: a whole movie about Gru trying to keep his family safe from the demons of his past. But Despicable Me 4 does not know how to take itself seriously, nor does it understand how to push its characters in interesting places. The first movie had a complete character arc for Gru, showing how his priorities changed when he became a father. The second movie gives him a love interest. The third movie gave him a twin brother but didn’t do anything meaningful with it.
Now, this fourth movie gives Gru a baby son. There’s so much potential here. We could have a film about a father struggling to connect with his son. We could see a father willing to do anything to keep his son safe. We can have all of the fun Minion shenanigans and wild antics while also telling something meaningful and compelling, as the first two movies did. But are we going to do that? No, we are not.
What do we have instead? Way too much going on at once. Despicable Me 4 is loaded to the brim with far too many storylines going on at once. We have Gru’s son, the Minions becoming a group of superheroes, Lucy’s horrifying experience pretending to be a hairstylist, a few more antics with Agnes and Edith, and Maxime’s evil mission, and we haven’t even gotten to the main story, which puts Gru on a heist with a teenager named Poppy Prescott (Joey King). This feels like an endless amount of subplots. Imagine several Despicable Me short films spliced together to make a feature-length film. That’s what this movie feels like.
Although everything vaguely connects (except the Lucy storyline, which is genuinely head-scratching), this is an unfocused movie with no clue what it’s doing. The screenplay is from franchise veteran Ken Daurio, who collaborates on the script with Mike White, creator of The White Lotus and writer of Migration, an Illumination movie from a few months prior that I genuinely enjoyed. Much like Despicable Me 3, we have many subplots and insufficient focus. We get more of the Minions smacking each other around and a lot of references to some very famous movies.
Despicable Me 4 is a listless movie that tries so hard to entertain you and is so scared of slowing down that it just assaults you with antics. The franchise has run out of ways for Gru to grow meaningfully as a person, so it reduces the Despicable Me franchise to the most weightless ingredients. It’s like when The Secret Life of Pets 2 felt like a bunch of short Saturday morning cartoons mixed into each other. While the animation and voice performances remain as energetic and spectacular as ever in this new sequel, this movie becomes irreparably stupid in its final act. Parts of this movie feel too derivative of The Incredibles, and all we have are emotionally uninteresting stories that feel like the tiring remnants of a once-great franchise.
SCORE: 4/10
As ComingSoon’s review policy explains, a score of 4 equates to “Poor.” The negatives outweigh the positive aspects making it a struggle to get through.
