Last year, I saw a lot of previews for Despicable Me, as well as a
lot of commercials making use of the little yellow minions who populate
the movie. I was so taken with these odd critters that I got my picture
taken with them in the display at my local theater. Somehow, though, I
didn’t see the movie until this week. I’m glad I finally got around to
it.
I’m generally a fan of Steve Carell,
whose career has consisted largely of him playing roles in which he is
some sort of lovable loser. That’s the case here as well, but this time,
he’s a super-villain named Gru. He’s certainly got the equipment for
it; he has an enormous secret lair under his hazardous home, and he
oversees thousands of minions, strange jabbering humanoids who are
super-short and resemble yellow pills. He rumbles through town in an
enormous metal contraption, and every time someone annoys him, he whips
out his freeze ray and makes a popsicle out of him. But as the movie
begins, he’s bemoaning the fact that a younger villain has pulled off
the amazing feat of stealing the Pyramids, and suddenly all his
accomplishments look pretty paltry. He needs to think big in order to
compete, and what could be bigger than the moon? Indeed, Gru has been
obsessed with the moon his whole life, and his plan to steal it, with
some help from a shrink ray, is the culmination of that fixation.
Carell
puts on a thick Russian accent for Gru, who is grumpy and anti-social
but really not prime super-villain material. His hideous dog steals his
food and chomps on his arm without repercussions. He leaves money in the
tip jar at the coffee shop. He expresses concern for his minions’ job
prospects when he believes that his plan is a bust. And whenever he’s in
the presence, even by phone, of his severe mother, voiced by Julie Andrews, all of his boyhood vulnerabilities and disappointments come rushing back to him. He desperately wants her validation.
When Vector (Jason Segel),
the twerpy, tracksuit-wearing villain who pulled off the Pyramid heist,
gets ahold of the shrink ray Gru needs, he realizes that it’s going to
take some fancy maneuvering to retrieve it. How can he get inside that
fortress? Enter clever, cynical Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), mischievous,
disaster-prone Edith (Dana Gaier) and adorable, affectionate Agnes
(Elsie Fisher). These three orphan sisters live in a home run by
sugary-sweet but sadistic Southerner Miss Hattie (Kristen Wiig), who is
eerily reminiscent of Dolores Umbridge, one of the most bone-chilling
villains in the Harry Potter universe. She forces them to spend their
days peddling cookies, and Vector has a sweet tooth, so Gru decides
these girls are his ticket to the access he needs. He adopts them merely
as a means to an end. But then a funny thing happens. He starts to get
attached to them…
It was pretty obvious from the previews where
this story was leading, but that didn’t make getting there any less fun
or endearing. This computer-animated movie is visually attractive and
filled with sight gags, particularly whenever the minions are on screen.
These little guys all look pretty similar, yet each one has a distinct
feature or two, and they’re always squabbling or goofing around or
creating something in the background, always in the same
incomprehensible language. Some of the movie’s most laugh-aloud moments
involve them. Gru, meanwhile, is a terrific character, too easy to
sympathize with to be repulsive. Each of the girls, so thrilled to have a
home at last, reacts to him differently. Agnes adores him instantly,
while Edith delights in defying him and Margo is afraid to get too close
to him. His interactions with the girls are hilarious but often
strangely sweet.
I rented this from Netflix, and I had a strange
experience I’d never encountered before. I couldn’t play the bonus
features. Instead, a message filled the screen, informing me that I
would need to buy the DVD in order to watch the extra features.
Is that unique to this movie, I wonder, or will this soon be a
commonplace practice? I don’t tend to be that interested in bonus
features beyond deleted scenes, but I still found it disappointing.
However, the movie itself was every bit as entertaining as I’d hoped it
would be. As touching as it is funny, Despicable Me isn’t despicable at all.
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