Screens/Movies

Where: In theatres
What: Movie, 98 minutes.
When: Wed., July 3
Genre: Family
Rating: NNNN (out of 5)
Why you should watch: Cinema-goers’ favourite creatures are back in the efficiently entertaining fourth instalment of the Despicable Me franchise.

IT’S UNCLEAR if the people at Illumination Entertainment — the animation studio behind the Despicable Me and Minions franchise — knew what a phenomenon they had on their hands with the first Despicable Me (2010). Could they have predicted the grip their little yellow creatures would have on culture at large? The minions, voiced largely by French director and animator Pierre Coffin, have been largely inescapable since then, gracing screens, front lawns, all manner of merchandise and most recently and impressively, the new Sphere Stadium in Las Vegas. After three Despicable Me and two Minions films, it would make sense if the fourth instalment felt uninspired or cursory, but Despicable Me 4 is an energetic and thoroughly entertaining escape.

Directed by Chris Renaud and Patrick Delage, the film finds the family, made up of Gru (voiced by Steve Carrell), Lucy (Kristen Wiig), their three adopted daughters (Joey King, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier) and their baby son (and the one-horned goat, Lucky and monster-dog named Kyle), forced into hiding after Gru’s school rival and recently escaped villain, Maxim Le Mal (Will Ferrell), swears to take revenge. In their new identities, the unconventional family is forced to pretend to be normal suburbanites: Gru is Chet who sells solar panels and Lucy is Blanche who works as a hairdresser. There might be a message here about staying true to yourself as the odd and awkward Gru has to pretend to be a friendly, tennis-loving, polo-wearing neighbour, but this deeper meaning is handily and gratefully averted. You would be hard-pressed to find any kind of lesson in the plot, and maybe that sounds shallow, but it’s smart to forgo sentimentality and focus on the fun parts.

And there are many fun parts (even if the film forgoes some of the more spectacular sequences from the previous films), like when the minions change the baby’s diaper in a spoof on a Formula 1 race pit stop or a chase scene in a supermarket between Lucy and an incensed, Cruella de Vil lookalike disappointed with her haircut. There’s also a recurring bit of a minion trapped in a vending machine, lovely night scenes in a Metropolis-esque city and a very large, lackadaisical cat playing Dance Dance Revolution.

There are also plenty of references to other films, like Gru’s Hogwarts-inspired alma-mater, Lycée Pas Bon (Lycée Not Good), a gothic castle perched on a cliff, and a subplot in which a select group of minions are imbued with superpowers and turned into versions of comic book heroes (one is stretchy, one looks like a pile of rocks, one shoots laser beams out of his eyes). A spoof on the iconic scene in Spider-Man 2 (2004), where Tobey Maguire’s Spider-Man stops a runaway subway train, is so brilliantly pulled off, it probably doesn’t matter if you’re not of the age to catch the reference.

Despicable Me 4 still falls into the tendency of animated films in the last few decades to fill their voice roles with a star-studded cast instead of voice actors. This leads to a stacked poster of recognizable names but frequently lacklustre vocal performances. Here, Sofía Vergara and Will Ferrell fail to find flair or energy in their villainous duo, Maxime Le Mal and Valentina. But while the duo is a weak point in the film, the villains in the franchise generally feel more like a requirement of the genre than something the creators really enjoyed dreaming up. (One exception would be the glamorous and aptly named Scarlett Overkill from 2015’s Minions.) The villains are not really the interesting thing, even the lead characters take a backseat to the film’s gibbering-speaking, overalls-wearing superstars.