Despicable Me 4 Review

Photo Credit - Universal Pictures

At its best, the Despicable Me franchise was magic. The twist of making the villain its main character yielded both hilarious and heartwarming moments kids and adults could enjoy. The animation made it a rarity amongst movies of the time by using 3-D technology purposefully instead of a box office cash grab. And the music? Its soundtracks produced Pharrell Williams’ inescapable, Oscar-nominated smash “Happy,” in addition to a nice score and slew of solid original songs written and produced by Williams. Sadly, the magic didn’t go beyond the second Despicable film as every subsequent entry, including the Minions prequels, progressively worsened.

Despicable Me 4, the franchise’s sixth entry, circles back to familiar territory. It finds present-day Gru (Steve Carrell) juggling being a new father to baby Gru Jr. and the family’s escape to a new city when an old nemesis,  Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell), resurfaces. The “fish out of water” plot offers some hope for a revival of the series, but the lack of the creativity that built the franchise smothers those aspirations.

The problem with DM 4 is the lack of growth and development for Gru and the company killed the imagination that made the franchise great. This one is Despicable Me paint-by-numbers with Gru’s struggles with being “good,” the Minions are clueless and clumsy, and the daughters’ respective personalities cause things to go haywire. There are no variations or attempts to differentiate from the gags and punchlines previously used in the series’s other entries. If you’ve watched one Despicable movie, even the Minions spinoffs, you’ve seen DM 4.

There’s some reprieve in the pop culture callbacks it features, especially the Terminator 2 homage and the final scene in DM 4. The scenes that feature Ferrell hamming it up as Le Mal also offer a few laughs. Still, not even those moments of nostalgia and devilish fun can salvage the mundane path DM 4 takes as opposed to the steady progression of the Hotel Transylvania series.

DM 4 suffers further as there are too many detours from the film’s main plot. Maybe it was to compensate for the lack of new material. Perhaps it was a last-ditch effort to give other characters some shine before wrapping up the Despicable universe. Either way, giving the Minions and other supporting characters gratuitous screen time that didn’t advance anything caused DM 4 to lose its way early and often.

Through the eyes of a child, DM 4 may be a solid watch to pass the time…if they’re at the age where they’re just happy to be out of the house. For other kids and everyone else, DM 4 is the cinematic equivalent of doing everything possible to get the last drop of ketchup out of the bottle when a new bottle was needed a while ago. Sure, there are some laughs to be had, but the redundancy and lack of effort to provide something fresh to the story ultimately sinks DM 4 to the point of not even being capable of serving as simply something to do.