In post-apocalyptic steampunk film Mortal Engines (2018), a pair of dusty Minion statues stand tall in a museum, mistakenly believed to be American deities.
As we reach our sixth movie in the Despicable Me Cinematic Universe, that throwaway detail of our dystopic future is beginning to feel less like a joke.
This latest entry sees reformed supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) in hiding after incurring the wrath of Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell with an exhausting French accent) — an old rival from his days at an academy for evil teens.
Forced to relocate his family from their gothic lair to the WASP-y small town of Mayflower, the series shifts gears to flaccid fish-out-of-water comedy.
It’s a set-up ripe for a 20-minute TV episode — The Simpsons, the original yellow icons of animation, played on this concept twice with far greater success — but it feels overwhelmingly pointless as a 95-minute feature.
Despicable Me 4 misses the opportunity to tell a story about families making the most of sudden change and breaching unfamiliar terrain as a team, the new setting largely being an excuse to poke fun at snooty suburbanites.
Gru tries and fails to endear himself to his country club neighbours. A drastically underqualified Lucy (Kristen Wiig) has a short-lived stint working at a ritzy salon. Their adopted kids are barely glimpsed, instead eclipsed by the newborn Gru Jr., who perpetually frustrates Gru’s parenting efforts.
The story is at least enlivened by a blackmail subplot, which sees Gru extorted by an aspiring adolescent villain (Joey King) into heisting his old school. Otherwise, you can practically feel the film running down the clock until Maxime returns to snap it out of its tedium.
Few people would begrudge these movies for indulging in kid-friendly frivolity, but its predecessors still managed to centre on a makeshift family coming into its own. With that unit now set in place, it’s abundantly clear this series has been reduced to spinning its wheels.
It doesn’t help that the film has few worthwhile jokes. Illumination, the animation studio behind Despicable Me (and other franchises like Sing and The Secret Life of Pets), seems to specialise in a comedic sensibility typically reserved for Gen X Facebook memes.
The film exclusively takes aim at dated targets like plant-based milks (not unlike a certain famous Pauls ad), credit cards, Karens, and kung fu. Inexplicably, in the year 2024, there are references to Terminator 2 and honey badgers.
It’s a genuine surprise to see Mike White credited as a writer on this film, considering the cutting contemporary satire of The White Lotus — at least until you remember he also co-wrote The Emoji Movie.
Kids will likely still get a kick out of the film. The sugar-rush slapstick of the Minions returns at full force when the Anti-Villain League decides to juice the sidekicks up with superpowers, lest Illumination run out of merchandising ideas. Even if their schtick is getting a little old, watching the Minions wreak chaos on a grander scale results in a handful of cute sight gags, and these fleeting diversions are handily the best part of the film.
Despicable Me 4 arrives only a week after Inside Out 2. Both are limp, reheated leftovers, but the latter has already proven a box office hit, and it wouldn’t surprise me if Gru’s latest outing repeated the billion-dollar success of previous entries. After all, no new family movies are slated to arrive in theatres until the locally made 200% Wolf in August.
Like Pixar, Illumination is betting its future on the expansion of pre-existing IP, which includes Super Mario Bros. and Sing. Founder and CEO Chris Meledandri has also teased that they’re “developing a couple of scripts in The Secret Life of Pets world” — whatever that means.
It’s a strategy that ensures the movies children are growing up with today will continue to be inherited from the generation before them. When they eventually become parents, they will have few original movies from their own childhood to share.
While lazy sequels have been around as long as movies have existed, never have they saturated the landscape to this extent. Despicable Me 4 is not a remarkably bad film, nor does it really jump the shark from what’s come before — but it does threaten to collapse under a critical mass of deja vu.
Despicable Me 4 is in cinemas now.
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