Gru and the Minions Return for More Scatterbrained Adventures in Despicable Me 4
I’d forgotten that it was in 2010 when Despicable Me was released to theaters. I knew then that kids would go crazy for the banana-yellow, gibberish-spouting Minions. Still, I had no idea I would be sitting here 14 years later looking at a now six-film franchise (three sequels and two spinoffs). But people embraced supervillain-with-an-unexpected-heart-of-gold Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), Anti-Villain League secret agent Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig), and precociously resilient orphaned sisters Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaie), and Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan), while the Minions have firmly entered the zeitgeist as arguably the most universally popular animated characters of the 21st century.
And so we come to Despicable Me 4. Much like every other entry in this series (save maybe the first film, but even that’s debatable), plot coherency is an afterthought. Instead, the audience is gifted a series of crazy vignettes that are loosely connected by only the most pointless example of a narrative throughline. We’ve got Gru and family in witness protection, a high school honey badger heist, super-powered Minions, cockroach-obsessed villain Maxime La Mal (Will Ferrell), transmogrified antics involving Gru’s infant son Gru Jr., intentionally terrible 1980s pop song cover performances, and a karate dojo face-off, and that’s just a small sample of all the nonsense that takes place over a briskly-paced 95 minutes.
Needless to say, the kids in the preview audience I saw this with ate the sequel up. Their laughter filled the theater, especially during all of the segments involving the Minions. While that isn’t shocking, much like 2022’s Minions: The Rise of Gru, there’s far more imbecilic wit put into everything these pint-sized underlings are a part of than I anticipated. There’s a running gag involving a vending machine that had me giggling, and an early bit involving a high school reunion’s lavish buffet table (including a gigantic mountain of Jello) is so goofily inspired it wouldn’t have been out of place in a comedy classic like Airplane or even The Muppet Movie.
Best of all is a short montage of a quintet of Minions gaining superpowers and then putting them to use with spectacular ineffectiveness before being “retired” from service by a disappointed Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan), back once more as the droll director of the Anti-Villain League. It’s almost immediately followed up with this ragtag group being “un-retired” to assist Gru in a time of need, and discovering what they all were up to for the minuscule period they were released from active service had me audibly chuckling.
There are attempts to give some of the characters some semblance of depth, but director Chris Renaud (returning to the series for the first time since Despicable Me 2), co-director Patrick Delage, and screenwriters Mike White (Migration, School of Rock) and Ken Daurio (who’s had a hand in all of the Despicable Me efforts) don’t exactly go out of their way to put too much of an emphasis on any of that. It’s not a big problem, as these features aren’t exactly enjoyed for their complexity or emotional nuance. But these moments are more noticeable than ever (most egregiously a subplot involving Margo trying to fit in at her new middle school), and seeing them introduce intriguing ideas only to be instantaneously ditched is still moderately annoying.
It all is what it is, and I seriously doubt the kids (now mostly all young adults themselves) who all got on this animated ride at its beginning and the oodles of new ones who are seeing Gru, his family, and all those Minions up on the big screen for the first time will hardly care. Love, like, tolerate, or loathe them, I think it’s safe to say at this point that these films are as close as we’re going to get to the days when Tex Avery, Friz Freleng, Chuck Jones, William Hanna, and Joseph Barbera were all creating iconic characters the entire world adored (and continues to do so today).
Does that make Despicable Me 4 great? No. Not at all. But I did laugh. More importantly, so did all the children. Sometimes that’s enough. This is one of those “sometimes.”
Film Rating: 2½ (out of 4)
