Bald
and looming, with a long bladelike nose, Despicable Me’s allegedly
despicable anti-hero, Gru resembles the Aadams Family’s Uncle Fester if
cartoonist Charles Aadams had been a CGI animator. Even his Gothic
purple lair, sticking out like a hangnailed thumb in the middle of the
suburbs would make Morticia and Gomez proud. Gru’s outrageous behaviour
in the face of domestic banality lends credence to his reputation as a
super villain par excellence. Even so, the wheels of time are
threatening to roll over Gru; his previous exploits just aren’t up to
scratch compared to the younger, hungrier bad guys coming up behind
him. What can he do to compete?
One
part Spy vs. Spy, one large part Pixar and another part Annie if Daddy
Warbucks was a sociopathic criminal, Despicable Me tells the story of
what lengths one evil genius will go to to stay on top, even if those
lengths require adopting three adorable children. Convoluted? Yes,
indeed. The plot contrivance is laboured, but then so is the rest of
Despicable Me. A joyless, uninventive, missed opportunity to do
something far more interesting than tell an utterly predictable story
about family love, even when it’s not the family you’re born with. The
script is lifeless and Gru’s guaranteed-to-amuse, cutesy, amorphous
yellow sidekicks grow tiresome after a very short while. The whole
proceedings become wearisome once you realise how very much is pilfered
from previous Pixar pictures. There’s the cheerful yellow minions’
resemblance to Toy Story’s happy little Buzz-loving Martians. The
youngest of the three moppets that Gru adopts and inevitably falls head
over paternal heels for is a hackneyed version of Monsters Inc.’s Boo.
Even the villain’s villain, Vector, is an incredibly lazy rehash of
Syndrome from The Incredibles; the normal guy with a big ego and an axe
(- or in this case, a piranha gun) to grind. In other rip-offs
(- the movie is about people who steal, after all), the head of
the Bank of Evil, responsible for keeping Gru from achieving his
greatest caper, the theft of the moon, is a dead ringer for the
pointy-haired boss from the comic strip Dilbert. Actually, because
financial institutions are clearly the true malevolence in the world,
the only real laugh in the film comes when we see the shingle for the
Bank of Evil, formerly Lehman Brothers. Would that there were more
truly witty moments like this throughout the film. The inclusion of the
three little orphans and the film’s subsequent predictability makes this
a soggy cereal and the lack of cleverness is unfortunate because there’s
certainly the possibility for more. The voice acting by Steve Carrell
as the Russian-ish Gru is really well done and Julie Andrews is
hilarious in too few scenes Gru’s mum, who makes it very easy to
understand why the sweet little Gru we see in flashbacks turned into the
super villain the world has come to hate. Russell Brand does nicely as
Gru’s elderly “Q”, Dr. Nefario, the man of a million gadgets and very
bad hearing. Pity the script isn’t as sharp as the folks acting it,
otherwise Despicable Me would have been something very special. It’s
not despicable, but it’s not much of anything else, either.
~ The
Lady Miz Diva
July 9th,
2010
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