I know that one of the main reasons why people like Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud's Despicable Me is the minions: those yellow, pill-shaped maniacs who seem impervious to injury. And, yes, they do help make an otherwise blasé film memorable. But here's my big problem with the minions: they exist in order to telegraph what emotion the audience should be feeling. During a happy scene, they smile. During a sad scene, they weep. During a funny scene, they cackle and babble in their indecipherable language. It seems like a cheap ploy to intensify audience reaction. But I digress. Despicable Me, a film about super-villain Gru who adopts three young orphans to help him in his super-schemes, does have a few things going for it. First, I did enjoy watching the single-parent dynamic between Gru and the three girls that he gradually starts to love. Watching how the world at large seems to just casually put up with the antics of full-fledged super-villains is also entertaining. The film features a charming art aesthetic, no doubt largely inspired by Pierre Coffin's French heritage. And a few of the film's jokes do work (my personal favorite was how the bank that funds international super-villains was labeled as "Formerly the Lehman Brothers"). But everything else about the film falls flat. Much of Gru's character and back-story is forced and contrived. And while Steve Carrell does an admirable job trying to bring life to this character, we can't help but feel that something is...lacking. Perhaps if Carrell had just picked one accent and not a vague mish-mash of Eastern European speech patterns. In general, the film is harmless children's entertainment. But in the era of Miyazaki and Pixar, "harmless" isn't good enough.
6/10
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