Despi­ca­ble Me 4 review – a paper-thin fourquel

My daugh­ter, aged six, loves movies. She doesn’t tend to care what they’re about, what the char­ac­ters are like, whether they’re fun­ny or sad or what­ev­er. She’s more inter­est­ed in the fact that they’re hap­pen­ing and they exist in front of her eyes for a peri­od of time.

For her, movies are enablers. They enable her not to do tidy­ing, or maths home­work, and they enable her to scoff fist­fuls of pop­corn and guz­zle sug­ary drinks. It’s in her per­son­al inter­est to love movies, and so when­ev­er I take her along to see one, her response to ​“What did you think?” is always the same: ​“100 out of ten!”

Lest my daugh­ter one day read this and feel as if I’m belit­tling her taste, I will defend myself and say that no kid has good movie taste. She rep­re­sents the child mass­es in this respect. That’s why we have films like Despi­ca­ble Me 4, ephemer­al diver­sions that allow time to be spent away from oth­er things. Per­son­al­ly, I wasn’t able to deduce many cre­ative rea­sons for a film like this to exist, but as it’s part of the most finan­cial­ly suc­cess­ful ani­ma­tion fran­chise in the his­to­ry of cin­e­ma (sic!), I guess I should take my cre­ative rea­sons and shove ​‘em.

This time around it’s the same char­ac­ters, the same gags, the same min­ions, the same wacky yet bland ani­ma­tion style, yet all with mas­sive­ly dimin­ish­ing returns. All the land­scape and char­ac­ter design has been car­ried over from the pre­vi­ous films, so there’s very lit­tle that’s new here. The onus to inno­vate and change tack when you’re stand­ing at the peak of a moun­tain of cash is just not going to be there, and so the name of the game is play it safe and make sure you can ush­er the kids across the fin­ish line in as quick and easy a man­ner as possible.

A film such as Despi­ca­ble Me 4 just has to stay the course, and that’s what it does with this paper-thin fourquel in which erst­while supervil­lain Gru, now in the pay of the Anti-Vil­lain League, assists his new col­leagues to take down cock­roach-fix­at­ed show­boat, Maxime Le Mal (Will Fer­rell). When Maxime springs out of jail and vows vengeance, Gru and his fam (which now includes the baby from The Boss Baby), are placed into the wit­ness relo­ca­tion pro­gramme, with sin­gu­lar­ly unsat­is­fy­ing results.

Even the scat­ter­gun antics of those lov­able min­ions fall flat this time out, sig­nalling how lit­tle juice remains in this par­tic­u­lar cre­ative tank. The cre­ation of a genet­i­cal­ly-mod­i­fied team of super­heroes, the Mega Min­ions, offers lit­tle more than an excuse for a series of weak sketch­es in which the new­ly-buff yel­low fel­las exer­cise their pow­ers in a range of dumb ways, much to the cha­grin of a needy public.

What these films do prove, how­ev­er, is that there is still life in the the­atri­cal expe­ri­ence yet, and ani­mat­ed fam­i­ly fea­tures, par­tic­u­lar­ly those that are part of fran­chis­es, seem to be sin­gle hand­ed­ly keep­ing the mul­ti­plex lights on at the moment. Whether any ratio­nal adult will come away from this with a rekin­dled desire to expe­ri­ence the sev­enth art in its intend­ed set­ting is unlike­ly, but we can hope that these films will intro­duce the notion of spec­ta­cle to younger view­ers in the hope that, one day, they’ll be head­ing into the dark on their own to a Jean Renoir retrospective.

Lit­tle White Lies is com­mit­ted to cham­pi­oning great movies and the tal­ent­ed peo­ple who make them.

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