"Despicable Me" is a movie about a man who wants to steal the moon apparently to convince his mother that he's not a loser. Okay, so the premise is absolutely ridiculous, but if you think about it, the premise of "Up" was just as stupid and still succeeded in being a mostly awesome movie, proving that it's not what you have to work with, but how you work with it that determines the quality of your work.
Of course, the key difference between the people at Pixar and the people at Universal Studios is that the people at Pixar have souls.
Despicable me is a movie with absolutely no redeeming qualities, no interesting events, no funny jokes and no moments that even made me smile (except for one where one of the little girls appears to get killed, but this is spoiled by the fact that she doesn't). The characters are poorly developed, frequently inconsistent and continually annoying and the only emotional response they provoked from me was that by the end of the film I sincerely wanted all of them to die.
The plot . . . well, I can summarize the plot with an elaborate metaphor: If the plot of this movie is a car, then it's a car built by somebody who had never studied auto-mechanics, but *did* stay at a Holiday Inn with someone who might, at some point in his life, have owned one. Furthermore, the car was constructed by stealing parts from half a dozen other cars, gluing them together and then spray-painting them a different color in the hopes that nobody will notice that there's not a single original part in the whole damn thing. The entire plot reeks of design by committee, specifically a committee of robots with outdated and buggy emotion simulator software. It's so formulaic in its structure that anyone who's seen the last five really popular animated movies will know immediately what is going to happen in the plot after the first five minutes, right down to which crappy jokes they'll use. Furthermore, no thought or effort went into presentation aside from "what kind of family movies have been really successful in the past and how can we imitate them." You will form no emotional attachment to the characters because they are hollow; attempts of the girls to be cute fall flat because they are formulaic to the point of being stilted. It's a corpse dressed in a pretty pink dress that fails to distract you that the thing inside the dress has been dead for years and smells really bad.
But the crowning element of ass in this ass of a movie is the little yellow mutants which succeed at the impossible by being more annoying than Spongebob Squarepants and less likable than Stalin. My friend who roped me into going to this movie and who's status as a friend is now in question because of it said that she could imagine those characters being made into flavored vitamins for little children. While that's certainly possible, I think a more poetically appropriate medical use for these critters would be as novelty suppositories, because this movie will rape every part of your being, leaving you hollow and angry.
So. Very. Angry.
Edit: This review seems to be suffering from a case of posting too quickly.
Okay, so people don't seem to see my points. My mistake was apparently trying to do a spoiler-free review. It doesn't seem to work so well.
But I did say what was wrong: this movie is a fake. There is nothing genuine about it. The little girls are stuffed with insincere sweetness, but have nothing in common with real children. Everything about their behavior is forced and overly sentimental. Children can be quite twisted and devious and this film does not acknowledge that because it's too busy trying to tug our heart-strings with puppy-dog eyes (and since I've trained six dogs not to beg, puppy-dog eyes don't work on me). If the film had brought out the darker side of children, it could have made them into characters that Gru might have found relateable to him, which would have made the story more interesting on the whole. Think about it for just a second: how much less sappy would this film have been if the girls ended up becoming super villains like their adoptive parent? You could still have had the plot of a man learning to love kids, but it wouldn't have been a piece of sickly-sweet ichor that makes you want to chew on tin-foil to distract yourself from the pain of watching the movie.
The plot is a formulaic "creepy guy adopts little orphan girls and learns to love them." It's been done a thousand times and the only unique elements it adds to this formula are badly presented to the point of not being worth mentioning. Even in its super villain flavor, it merely parrots what's been done before, asking us to take it with a straight-face and reserve our giggles for predictable slapstick, as if it isn't aware that its ripping material from every cartoon supervillain that's ever lived.
Gru, as a character, is inconsistent. He dismisses the apparent death of one child by saying "It's okay, the plan will work with just two," (which was the only joke in the whole movie I laughed at), but in the next scene, he freaks out when the girl holds her breath because he doesn't want her to die, then goes back to caring about them only as tools in a scheme and being annoyed that they are there, then is suddenly standing up for them when a carnival game clerk is cheating them out of a toy. Although his voice acting was brilliant, his presentation completely destroys any appeal of the character. Even the way he moves and is designed looks like it was taken directly from several b-movie mad scientist films.
What would have made him better? Drop the saccharine bullshit. You can have a story about a bitter old guy who learns to care about people that doesn't give you diabetes, as Up demonstrated. Make Gru consistent in his behavior and pace his character arc so that he actually takes time to develop affection for the girls rather than jumping in and out of being annoyed and playing teatime. Develop his sarcasm into a biting wit and keep that as an essential part of his character throughout the entire film instead of dropping it after two or three jokes to make room for the artificial sweeteners and fart guns.
The humor is done and redone to the point of not being funny and this is not helped by the fact that the previews showed us the only jokes that might have actually been good, so I was tired of them before I ever went in. The old guy gets jokes about being deaf and riding a motorized scooter that's slow as hell. The impossible to please mother has no characteristics aside from being impossible to please. You get double-takes, fart jokes, the little yellow fuckers say "butt" as their only coherent word, and cheesy slapstick as predictable as "1+1=2" (or, in this case, "smiley-face underpants + getting your balls grabbed = ha ha).
This film needed dark humor. I mentioned that one about the girl nearly getting killed. Gru's reaction to that was perfect. Had the film kept on with that kind of dark and twisted humor, I wouldn't have felt so bad about her not dying then.
They could have made a interesting dark comedy that satirizes the nonsensically evil nature of most cartoon villains while simultaneously showing a man reaching for his dreams (ridiculous though they are) while learning to care about those around him. What they made instead was a poorly-paced, cavity-causing mess that has no heart. The writers took the safe and easy road. Nothing good or uplifting comes from safe and easy.
Enjoy this film if you must, but this is a movie that will be swiftly forgotten in the sands of time, easily replaced by the next color-by-numbers abomination that the studio execubots ejaculate out on their Saturday evening circle-jerk.
Oh, and take note, those are your souls they're using to clean up the mess.
Of course, the key difference between the people at Pixar and the people at Universal Studios is that the people at Pixar have souls.
Despicable me is a movie with absolutely no redeeming qualities, no interesting events, no funny jokes and no moments that even made me smile (except for one where one of the little girls appears to get killed, but this is spoiled by the fact that she doesn't). The characters are poorly developed, frequently inconsistent and continually annoying and the only emotional response they provoked from me was that by the end of the film I sincerely wanted all of them to die.
The plot . . . well, I can summarize the plot with an elaborate metaphor: If the plot of this movie is a car, then it's a car built by somebody who had never studied auto-mechanics, but *did* stay at a Holiday Inn with someone who might, at some point in his life, have owned one. Furthermore, the car was constructed by stealing parts from half a dozen other cars, gluing them together and then spray-painting them a different color in the hopes that nobody will notice that there's not a single original part in the whole damn thing. The entire plot reeks of design by committee, specifically a committee of robots with outdated and buggy emotion simulator software. It's so formulaic in its structure that anyone who's seen the last five really popular animated movies will know immediately what is going to happen in the plot after the first five minutes, right down to which crappy jokes they'll use. Furthermore, no thought or effort went into presentation aside from "what kind of family movies have been really successful in the past and how can we imitate them." You will form no emotional attachment to the characters because they are hollow; attempts of the girls to be cute fall flat because they are formulaic to the point of being stilted. It's a corpse dressed in a pretty pink dress that fails to distract you that the thing inside the dress has been dead for years and smells really bad.
But the crowning element of ass in this ass of a movie is the little yellow mutants which succeed at the impossible by being more annoying than Spongebob Squarepants and less likable than Stalin. My friend who roped me into going to this movie and who's status as a friend is now in question because of it said that she could imagine those characters being made into flavored vitamins for little children. While that's certainly possible, I think a more poetically appropriate medical use for these critters would be as novelty suppositories, because this movie will rape every part of your being, leaving you hollow and angry.
So. Very. Angry.
Edit: This review seems to be suffering from a case of posting too quickly.
Okay, so people don't seem to see my points. My mistake was apparently trying to do a spoiler-free review. It doesn't seem to work so well.
But I did say what was wrong: this movie is a fake. There is nothing genuine about it. The little girls are stuffed with insincere sweetness, but have nothing in common with real children. Everything about their behavior is forced and overly sentimental. Children can be quite twisted and devious and this film does not acknowledge that because it's too busy trying to tug our heart-strings with puppy-dog eyes (and since I've trained six dogs not to beg, puppy-dog eyes don't work on me). If the film had brought out the darker side of children, it could have made them into characters that Gru might have found relateable to him, which would have made the story more interesting on the whole. Think about it for just a second: how much less sappy would this film have been if the girls ended up becoming super villains like their adoptive parent? You could still have had the plot of a man learning to love kids, but it wouldn't have been a piece of sickly-sweet ichor that makes you want to chew on tin-foil to distract yourself from the pain of watching the movie.
The plot is a formulaic "creepy guy adopts little orphan girls and learns to love them." It's been done a thousand times and the only unique elements it adds to this formula are badly presented to the point of not being worth mentioning. Even in its super villain flavor, it merely parrots what's been done before, asking us to take it with a straight-face and reserve our giggles for predictable slapstick, as if it isn't aware that its ripping material from every cartoon supervillain that's ever lived.
Gru, as a character, is inconsistent. He dismisses the apparent death of one child by saying "It's okay, the plan will work with just two," (which was the only joke in the whole movie I laughed at), but in the next scene, he freaks out when the girl holds her breath because he doesn't want her to die, then goes back to caring about them only as tools in a scheme and being annoyed that they are there, then is suddenly standing up for them when a carnival game clerk is cheating them out of a toy. Although his voice acting was brilliant, his presentation completely destroys any appeal of the character. Even the way he moves and is designed looks like it was taken directly from several b-movie mad scientist films.
What would have made him better? Drop the saccharine bullshit. You can have a story about a bitter old guy who learns to care about people that doesn't give you diabetes, as Up demonstrated. Make Gru consistent in his behavior and pace his character arc so that he actually takes time to develop affection for the girls rather than jumping in and out of being annoyed and playing teatime. Develop his sarcasm into a biting wit and keep that as an essential part of his character throughout the entire film instead of dropping it after two or three jokes to make room for the artificial sweeteners and fart guns.
The humor is done and redone to the point of not being funny and this is not helped by the fact that the previews showed us the only jokes that might have actually been good, so I was tired of them before I ever went in. The old guy gets jokes about being deaf and riding a motorized scooter that's slow as hell. The impossible to please mother has no characteristics aside from being impossible to please. You get double-takes, fart jokes, the little yellow fuckers say "butt" as their only coherent word, and cheesy slapstick as predictable as "1+1=2" (or, in this case, "smiley-face underpants + getting your balls grabbed = ha ha).
This film needed dark humor. I mentioned that one about the girl nearly getting killed. Gru's reaction to that was perfect. Had the film kept on with that kind of dark and twisted humor, I wouldn't have felt so bad about her not dying then.
They could have made a interesting dark comedy that satirizes the nonsensically evil nature of most cartoon villains while simultaneously showing a man reaching for his dreams (ridiculous though they are) while learning to care about those around him. What they made instead was a poorly-paced, cavity-causing mess that has no heart. The writers took the safe and easy road. Nothing good or uplifting comes from safe and easy.
Enjoy this film if you must, but this is a movie that will be swiftly forgotten in the sands of time, easily replaced by the next color-by-numbers abomination that the studio execubots ejaculate out on their Saturday evening circle-jerk.
Oh, and take note, those are your souls they're using to clean up the mess.
