DESPICABLE ME 4 - Mark Reviews Movies

Despicable Me 4, Universal Pictures

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Review by Mark Dujsik | July 3, 2024

At a certain point, the world of reformed supervillain Gru (voice of Steve Carell) must have become too expansive for this series' own good. That's not to say any of these previous movies, three in the mainline series and two spin-offs/prequels, have really succeeded for various reasons, most of them to do with the fact that they never embraced the villainy of its anti-hero.

However, the makers of Despicable Me 4 now find themselves in the unenviable position of having to find something to do with its sizeable cast of characters. Instead of simply coming up with a singular plot for all of them, screenwriters Mike White and Ken Daurio divide the cast into a string of subplots that don't give any of them much to do. The result feels more like a feature-length sitcom, in which everything is a side plot, than a complete and cohesive story.

It's as if the filmmakers don't trust the attention span of their young target audience, so everything here has to be an isolated adventure or gag. None of them is particularly exciting or funny, and even the series' break-out stars, the chaotic collective force of the Minions, are mostly sidelined to background jokes. For some, this will come as good news, but either way, it's a sign that the comedic energy of even the simplest of these movies' ideas has been drained by this sixth installment.

The main plot, which becomes a forgotten excuse for a new narrative until the third act, has Gru, now set in his role as an agent with the Anti-Villain League, apprehending an old nemesis at his villain school reunion. The bad guy this time is Maxime (voice of Will Ferrell), who has come up with a way to transform himself into a human-cockroach hybrid (since the insects are so resilient), and after Gru and the League apprehend Maxime, his old grudge against our hero—having to do with a school talent show decades prior—becomes an obsession to destroy him and everything he holds dear. That he spends most of the movie flying around in a roach-shaped ship and waiting for a climactic showdown should give one a notion of how unimportant some semblance of a plot is for this entry.

Instead, the movie follows Gru, his wife Lucy (voice of Kristen Wiig), their three adopted daughters—Margo (voice of Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (voice of Dana Gaier), and Agnes (voice of Madison Polan)—and newborn baby, and the Minions (collectively voiced by Pierre Coffin) as they adjust to a life in hiding. Sent to a League safe house in a well-to-do neighborhood, the family adopt new identities and try to fit in with the locals.

It's a potentially clever setup, except that everyone is off doing their own thing. Lucy becomes a hair stylist at a salon, resulting in a disastrous first day and an injured customer who chases her through a grocery store. That's the extent and end of Lucy's episode, by the way, just as girls have a pair of scenes showing their troubles adapting to this new life. Margo has difficulty making friends, and Agnes refuses to lie about her assumed name, leading to a standoff at a karate class with an out-of-shape instructor.

Each little episode is a one-joke affair, basically, and while that technically means the movie has at least five jokes spread throughout it, none of them is particularly effective. It's thin material spread even thinner.

Gru does sort of get to return to his villainous ways, after a neighbor child named Poppy (voice of Joey King) figures out who he really is, blackmails him, and forces him to help steal the villain's school mascot (a honey badger, by the way, which would have felt like a reach of a joke for cultural relevance a decade ago and just comes across as desperate for a gag now). The sequence is something with a setup and payoff, a reminder of who these characters are on a fundamental level, and a slightly clever hook (Gru forgets his toolkit and has to make do with stuff for the baby), at least, which is more than can be said of the quarter-cooked subplots surrounding it.

Obviously, that leaves one question: Where are the Minions during all of this? Well, a few are with Gru and the family (The big joke there is that one is trapped in a vending machine, which might be an apt metaphor for how stuck this movie is in coming up with creative ideas), while the rest are assigned to the League. Five of them become the subjects of an experiment, turning them into superheroes, and it's kind of amusing to watch the team bumble and fail their way through attempts at heroic deeds in the city.

What we have here is a bunch of unconnected business, which is harmless and inoffensive but overly familiar and wholly disinterested in coming up with anything different. Despicable Me 4 almost seems fully aware that it's more a distraction—a good-natured and occasionally amusing one, at least—than a movie.

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