Review: DESPICABLE ME 3

DESPICABLE ME 3
(FAMILY-COMEDY/ANIMATION)
★
Directed by Kyle Balda & Pierre Coffin
Screenplay by Cinco Paul & Ken Daurio
Featuring the Voices of: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Trey Parker, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Nev Scharrel, Steve Coogan, Julie Andrews, Jenny Slate, Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud
Rated PG for action and rude humor.
90 minutes
Verdict: Well, it isn't good.
YOU MAY BE INTERESTED IN DESPICABLE ME 3 IF YOU LIKED:
MINIONS  (2015)
DESPICABLE ME 2  (2013)
DESPICABLE ME  (2010)
THE SECRET LIFE OF PETS  (2016)
SING  (2016)

Do you love familiar sitcom plots and cheap animation?  How '80s references?  Do you love '80s references?  Are you a fan of those shitty yellow jelly beans from your awkward aunt's memes?  Slapstick?  Recycled jokes?  Celebrity voices?  Lazy writing?  Butts?  Lots of butts?  Like, seriously, why so many butts?  Nothing against jokes about butts, but for goodness' sake, what's going on numbers of butts?  One can feel the smug, cynical self-satisfaction of the minds at Illumination Entertainment, where animation costs are kept low, marketing campaign costs are high, and a lot of branding and spastic, low-rent humor suck children and their parents' dollars in like a black hole of depressing consumerism thinly disguised as entertainment.  Sure, your kids will eat it up, but most kids will eat dirt from time to time if you're not watching.  It's just so uninspired and lacking in good will, and it's only more frustrating that it doesn't matter, and the suits at Illumination know it, so they can put less than half the time and money into a movie than more sincere filmmakers do and still make a load anyway by taking advantage of impressionable children with the same ruthlessness of a cigarette advertisement billboard next to an elementary school.

They're really stretching to justify another chapter in Gru's story this time, too.  After a botched mission results in his being fired from the Anti-Villain League, Gru (voiced by Steve Carell, with a noted decrease in enthusiasm) learns that he has a twin brother who he's never met named Dru (also voiced by Carell, with surprisingly little variation).  Gru travels to Dru's wealthy estate and they immediately hit it off, deciding to plot the heist of a recently stolen giant diamond from Balthazar Bratt (voiced by South Park co-creator and voice Trey Wilson), a villain built up around an array of gimmicks related to the 1980s.  Meanwhile, in a couple of B plots (though, to be fair, they all feel like B plots), Gru's new wife Lucy (voiced by Kristen Wiig) tries to settle into her role as a mother to their daughters Margo (the snooty, bitchy one with glasses; voiced by Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (the "butch" one; voiced by Dana Gaier), and Agnes (the cute card; voiced by Nev Scharrel), while Agnes tries to catch a unicorn in the woods.  That's pretty much it.  Nothing else to see here.  If any one of these plots were a short film or a TV special, that might make more sense, but here, in a feature film, they're just disparate elements that never come together in any meaningful way, without payoff.

If it weren't for the branding, this would easily be bargain basement material, and even compared to the previous movies in the series, the third is a step down.  It probably won't make a difference though, because MINIONS was bargain basement material and grossed more than any of Pixar's masterpieces, because we live in a fallen world.  I get it, kids need to be entertained.  When your little tyke looks up at you with their big ol' eyes and says, "I wanna go to the popcorn show," you can't just not take them!  Even if the movie is a spray of cold diarrhea, it's so fun to see how excited the little ones become over it (I mean, if they're little ones that you have a personal connection to, as opposed to other people's annoying and over-excitable children whose enthusiasm you'd just like to crush sometimes), but there are better kids movies than this.  Disney make better kids movies than this.  Pixar makes better kids movies than this.  Laika, although for slightly older kids, makes better kids movies than this.  Even DreamWorks Animation makes better kids movies than this.  But kids know what a stupid Minion is, so they have to go see this one, and your lonely aunt thinks those little girls are so cute, and this is why we can't have nice things.

                                                                                                                                                                   Images via Universal