Despicable Me 4 review: Hit and miss

Despicable Me 4

U: Animation, comedy
Dir: Chris Renaud
Cast: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Will Ferrell, Sofia Vergara
Rating: ''1/2

Gru, the reformed bad guy who was introduced in the 2010 Illumination Studio's popular original, is back as a family man being severely tempted into villainy in Despicable Me 4. Scripted by Mike White and Ken Daurio, and directed by Chris Renaud (who also directed the first two movies), the narrative pits Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) a snooty Frenchman who attended Lycée Pas Bon, Gru's alma mater, against Gru (Steve Carell). If you will recall, Lycée Pas Bon is essentially a sort of training school for super-villains.

Old hurts bloom here. Maxime blames Gru for an age-old humiliation at the school talent show, and has been stewing over how he can avenge that. Their meeting is fraught with tensions, awkward exchanges and open challenges. The class reunion reawakens Maxine's evil competitive spirit and he, backed by his girlfriend Valentina (Sofia Vergara), seeks vengeance by transforming himself into a genetically engineered cockroach man. Unfortunately, he gets arrested and confined to a super-villain prison. Eventually, he breaks out, re-teams with Valentina and his cockroach army, and kidnaps Gru's newest family addition, Gru Junior. No prizes for guessing where this is headed.

The humour is largely plebeian, nothing more than seeing the young father goofing around making a fool of himself. There's a bit of fun to be had seeing a wealthy victim of Gru's wife, Lucy's (Kristen Wiig) destructive hair care and chasing her through a supermarket. There's not much of that kind of broad humour here though. Gru buffoons through his childcare routines, fails to protect his family, but eventually gets the job done with a lot of assistance from his batch of super minions and family.

When Gru accidentally jabs himself in the leg with a hypodermic needle full of sedatives, and then rides a minion, it's not funny. The minion army basically adds slapstick routines to the already beleaguered narrative. The rescue ops is ridiculously lame, but the introduction of a flying car and other getaway vehicles lends it a post-modern touch. The adding of characters like the teenage girl-next-door, Poppy Prescott (Joey King), who wants to be a super-villain and drags Gru into a half-baked scheme to steal a mascot from his former school, fails to make it funnier. In fact, that subplot waylays the main thread and increases the tedium.

Despicable Me 4 is overrun by over-zealous misdemeanours acts that fail to connect into a wonderful whole. The caricaturing is excellent but the writing and direction are wayward. Even though the narrative ends in a brisk 95 minutes, it feels tedious and unfulfilling.

The main thread is never developed fully enough to come good. So what we get is a distracted narrative clutching at straws. The minions, most of the time, look as though they are a side show to the main story. Fortunately, the cast delivers engaging voice performances and the overall animation is impressively detailed. The gorgeous animation though fails to save it from being repetitive and boring for most of its short runtime.