Despicable Me review

If Pixar and "Toy Story 3" told of what is all right in the world of animated films, then "Despicable Me" tells heavily of what's wrong. Yes, much like my unpopular opinion of this springs big hit "How to Train Your Dragon", I just don't get the greatness that's supposed to be found in "Despicable Me". I get the references and the point of the story... but I don't see what's supposed to be so great about it all. Perhaps if the movie went as far as to give us something that was... oh say... original feeling, then maybe I'd be on board.

Basically the film is as the trailer dictated. Gru (voiced by Steve Carrell) is a super villain who has been out matched by Vector (voiced by Jason Segel). This starts a rivalry between the two that ultimately leads to Gru adopting three young girls so that they can sneak into Vector's fortress and steal a shrink ray which will allow him to commit the crime of the century; which is stealing the moon. And as mildly complex at that might sound, it's really not. In fact it's so incredibly simple minded that at one point I forgot it entirely and felt the film was designed for the sole purpose of making an over the top villain have to take care of kids. In my mind that's about as awesome as action heroes taking care of kids ('The Spy Next Door', 'Race to Witch Mountain', 'The Pacifier', 'Kindergarten Cop' etc).

Now much like in 'How to Train Your Dragon', our lead (in this case Carrell) offers up a voice that after about forty minutes or so will have officially gotten on your last nerve. Basically Gru is something of a Russian or German or general Europe type and Carrell's voice acting chops wavers throughout. Sometimes it's meshes together alright and sometimes it's like he's speaking normally, but very slowly. Regardless of that it's still an annoying ass accent. Segel's isn't much better as his tries his hardest to sound dastardly. All the while his character Vector simply does mildly smirk inspiring things like dispatching attack sharks on Gru by dragging his butt across a computer board. Splendid.

I can say however that I don't think this is quite as horrible as I expected. Honestly I've been dreading this movie all summer. None of the trailers interested me in the slightest and after a while of hearing the snazzy one line the world loves ('it's so fluffy, I gonna die!') about fifty thousand times I was pretty dead set against it. But it's not totally bad, just really lame. In fact while watching it myself and my friends noted the similarities to the animated adventure, comedy "Hoodwinked"; both through substance and animation style. Oh and they're both super lame. One thing I remember about "Hoodwinked" specifically was that it was ugly as far as CGI animation goes. Obviously it was made much cheaper than most, but the characters looked oddly shaped and almost so cartoonish that it was a turn off. The lighting was always really wonky in which it would range from awkwardly lit in the house to this blue night which made it's characters look slightly crappier. With "Despicable Me" it all seemed like it was one tier up. The designs were better, the lighting was better, the storytelling was... about the same and the character movements were just as stiff as before. I should say that I don't know if it's the same team, but there are many connections that could be made. Some of the jokes are fairly clever due to the timing of the actors and sometimes of the images like in the case of the sight gags. But it's never anything to write home about.

Yes... that's the phrase I want to use. It's nothing to write home about. The world is that of Roger Moore- James Bond movies and not in the cool way like 'The Incredibles'. It's a world of general cartoonishness, but with less interested writers. They never go full 'Shrek' sequel and just start pumping out pop culture references for laughs, but it'll play tricks like it. It'll somewhat be touching and somewhat be clever, but none of these things ever hit their marks. It's simply a safe and easy going animated feature that brings nothing new to the table. I maintain what I said about animated films in the spring, in that so many of them play by the same rules. I'd love to see some more animated films that attempted something more creative or more clever. I have hope for projects like Gore Verbinski's "Rango" (in glorious 2D) which he explained awesomely and I'm interested to see what Zack Snyder's "The Legend of the Guardians" will be like. I feel like there's a push to just give out the most generalist animated pictures and maybe if a couple of more experimental or stronger written ones come along and spice the field up, that it could create a change in the flow of things and maybe we'll end up seeing some more impressive animation features coming out way.