I must have had a lot of time on my hands this weekend. There was a showing of this pretty early yesterday, so I thought, I have been meaning to see this and just haven’t gotten to it. In all honesty, this is something that is fun, but hasn’t really built on the brand too much. In typical serial fashion, Gru discovers that he’s got a brother and the brother wants to be a super villain. Wackiness pretty much ensues shortly thereafter. I’m not sure I’d say any of this is a SPOILER, but the movie is pretty predictable, and yet I still found it fun. After watching the standalone Minion movie, I can see why their part has been minimized here. Without Gru, or even the kids, the minions are tough to figure out.
The movie starts off with Gru being a good guy now, working with his wife, whose name I’ve already forgotten (Kristen Wiig does the voice). They get outsmarted by a 1980’s villain and from that point on it really starts to feel more episodic vs. a movie. Shortly after getting fired Gru is approached by a man who says he has a twin brother that he never knew about. Turns out the brother is a failure at being a villain, while Gru is not. It was the wrong child-swap, I guess. I have to be honest, I sort of glazed over a bit after that.
With respect to the Hina Test, this gets a hard fail. There were pretty much only white people in the movie (or European of questionable descent) and the female characters were there mostly to move the plot forward, save the youngest kid finding a unicorn. I don’t understand why it would have been so hard to add a little bit of racial diversity to an animated movie. I get that Despicable Me is about Gru, but he’s married and has three daughters, why aren’t they more at the forefront?
Was I amused? Sure. Was it the best movie ever? No. There were moments of heart, like Margo and the step-mom having a moment, or the littlest kid finding a goat with one horn (in her mind, a unicorn), but overall it was just amusing, but it didn’t have much staying power. For $7, it was worth watching.
This should come as no surprise that I opted to see this movie, in 3-D, but that didn’t actually work, but at least AMC gave me my money back. The trailers really delivered basically what was going to be in the movie. There isn’t really a plot for me to spoil. The story is supposed to be an origin story, leading the audience through the Minions finding Groo. What happened was really an hour and a half of slapstick, sometimes crude adult jokes and little else. For an adult, it was entertaining, for a kid, it will be memorable for doing physical comedy with others and little else.
What made the first two Despicable Me movies so memorable wasn’t the Minions by themselves, but the family factor from Groo and the girls. Without that, the Minions are truly sidekicks, as the movie shows. It isn’t that the Minions aren’t fun, they are. A movie where they are front and center, with their piecemeal language, is impossible to follow. The movie never made sense. My cousins and I spent much of the movie trying to figure out whether they were speaking Spanish, Italian or French and the consensus is that it was a mix of all three.
The idea of the movie was great, and I do love the Minions, but for $15, I’m not sure this movie is worth seeing in the theatre. It had a few good laughs and the main Minions that are followed are very entertaining, but they can’t hold the loose plot together much, if at all.
