Despicable Me 4 (Renaud and Delage, 2024)
The first two notes I had from my advanced screening were about jokes in the opening five to ten minutes of screen time. Gru’s antagonist for the film takes on the identity of a cockroach because the insects are indestructible, noting particularly that they cannot be squished. (Cockroaches are actually quite squishable.) His daughter prompts her pet goat to take a dump on the kitchen floor (yes the goat scat is shown) because it cannot differentiate between “sit” and whatever other command that rhymes with “sit” she might be in the habit of giving him.
My last note was a shocked record of the rapturous applause from the non-critics in the audience at the end of the movie, the majority of whom were under ten.
The Minions had worn out their welcome two or more movies ago, but I have the original Despicable Me streaming on Peacock in the background as I write this to test my memory. I remembered it as being winsome in its way, and even just a quick refresher is enough to confirm my impression that there was a story there and not just a bunch of cartoon antics.
Despicable Me 4 makes the rubble bounce on the cartoonification of the franchise. Perhaps the very thing that made the first film okay — the character arc — is what makes the sequels increasingly less effective. If we are redoing the first, then Gru soulc have to regress so that he can transform again. If we are not, then there isn’t much left for him to do. Hence, the film proceeds at a breakneck pace while dragging all the while.
The plot, such as it is, involves Gru and his family going undercover because Maxine Le Mal threatened to kidnap his baby. He plays tennis with his snooty neighbors while Lucy pretends to be a hairdresser and the girls whose names we don’t remember pout because they have to pretend to have new names. Gru is recognized by the neighbor’s daughter because nobody is really taking the premise seriously, including the writers. Meanwhile, a handful of Minions get Captain America super serum which advances the plot not at all but I guess provides a new skew of toys to peddle.
After a few more scenes of the Minions doing nothing and an eventual climactic battle in which Gru may or may not save his baby from becoming a mini-me cockroach, all is set right with time left over for a prison talent show because…well who wouldn’t want to sing a duet with the high-school rival that just tried to kill your baby?
None of this apparently mattered to anyone in the theater under a certain age. Whether the age threshold for enjoying DM4 was ten or two score and ten, I can’t say for sure. But unless Universal bussed in a bunch of paid kids to make their rally look more grassroots, I can only assume that there is still plenty of goodwill floating around for this franchise.
