Full and fair disclosure: I like those little Minions and I would go see Despicable Me 4 regardless. But as an accredited film reviewer, I can’t let personal biases get (too much) in the way. Therefore, when I went to see the new Minions-and-Gru mash-up, I brought a secret weapon with me – a 14-year-old nephew who grew up on the films. As it’s been a while since I was that age, he would be my litmus test. Are these gibberish-speaking, adorably inept guys still fun? Is Gru the Super-Bad-turned-Super-Dad still super?
The plot picks up where the last Minions movie left off… sort of. Gru and his wife Lucy are agents with the Anti-Villain League, or in Minion Speak, the AVL. Their trio of adopted girls haven’t aged a bit and are just as adorable as they were in 2010 in the first of the franchise. This time, there’s a new member of the family, Gru, Jr., who seems to love to torture his dad.
New bad guy Maxime Le Mal, a cockroach-obsessed alumnus at the exclusive villains-only high school he and Gru attended, has a personal vendetta against our favorite former evil mastermind and plans to kill Gru’s son to get back at him. The AVL puts the whole family into the Witness Protection Plan and ships them off to a safe house in an obnoxiously snooty small town. Let’s just say that they don’t blend in so well and that gives rise to some of the best sight gags I’ve seen in movies for a long time. Enter the next challenge – Poppy, the pre-teen girl next door who happens to be a wanna-be villain. She immediately identifies the undercover Gru and blackmails him into helping her pull off a heist by kidnapping Gru Jr. It’s a bit of a Minion-tinted mid-life crisis.
About those Minions… the whole collective work at the Anti Villain League where a mad scientist decides to experiment on some of them to turn them into Super Minions (think the Fantastic Four with blue overalls and utterly unable to control their superpowers). It’s a send-up that every superhero movie deserves. The multiple sub-plots converge at Maxime and Gru’s old high school.
Steve Carrel and Kirsten Wigg are back as the voices of Gru and Lucy. Will Farrell imbues Maxime Le Mal with voice and character, and Joey King is Poppy. Pierre Coffin is, as usual, the voice of all the Minions. Regular ‘Minions’ and ‘Despicable Me’ composer Heitor Pereira hits every right note with this romp.
Despicable Me 4 has everything we’ve come to expect, and both my nephew and I were laughing – often at different things – the whole time. The film is packed with one-liners, wonderfully fanciful gadgets and a Bollywood-esque dance scene at the end which my 14-year-old companion said earned the movie “an eleven out of ten”. I thought it was a whole lot of fun and is likely to be one of the summer’s movie highlights. Universal’s Illumination artists have once again done what every Hollywood studio dreams of – they’ve kept the franchise fresh and yet familiar, and most importantly, fun.