Plenty of laughs, just a little short on ambition
Despicable Me 3 U cert, 90 min ★★★★★ Dirs Kyle Balda, Pierre Coffin Starring Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Trey Parker, Steve Coogan, Julie Andrews, Jenny Slate, Andy Nyman (voices)
For all their extraordinary popularity, the Despicable Me films have never quite landed on a look or tone that felt ineffably them. You don’t know what you’ll get, apart from Minions, in the same way as you do for, say, a Lego movie. That said, there was a lovely sequence in the first Despicable Me (2010) in which grouchy Gru (voiced, then and now, by Steve Carell) takes his three adopted daughters to a carnival: they board a rollercoaster, Pharrell Williams fades up on the soundtrack, and Gru tries and fails to stifle his own excitement.
The moment has an authentic pop sweetness that Illumination Entertainment’s films have struggled to recapture since – both within the Despicable cycle (of which this film, if you count 2015’s Minions, is the fourth), and outside it, in Sing, The Secret Life of Pets, and other injectionmoulded side-projects. But Despicable Me 3 often comes close – a welcome turn of events that has less to do with the bitty story at hand than a newfound sense of warmth and wonder in the computer-generated animation itself.
It’s evident straight away, in a fizzy prologue that tees up the bad guy du jour: a fallen child star called Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker) whose villainous MO is heavily Eighties-themed. This means selfinflating bubblegum bombs, a keytar cannon shooting out weaponised Van Halen riffs, and more – ideas no less gimmicky than the fart gun and rocket-powered ball gown of previous films, but enlivened with more exuberance and tighter comic rhythm.
This goes double, literally, once Gru and long-lost blond twin Dru (also voiced by Carell) join forces, in black and white bodysuits, to retrieve a rose diamond Bratt has pinched from a Paris museum. The mission is like a Spy vs. Spy strip crossed with a Friz Freleng Pink Panther cartoon, and, given the colours involved, it’s not inconceivable that this was the exact creative brief directors Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin were working from. Either way, it’s consistently funny.
The Minions are mostly hived off in their own subplot, lending the film the air of a $75million plate-spinning exercise: another subplot sees Gru’s new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) bond with his eldest daughter Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), with a further strand in which the two younger girls search the woods for a unicorn. All four have their moments without amounting to very much, and are chopped between haphazardly.
All of this makes you wonder if the ideal format for the Despicable Me films might be an anthology of shorter, connected escapades like the Disney Animation package films of the Forties. Considering fans will surely now follow the series’ progress with Miniony contentedness, you can’t help but hope Illumination might find the Gru-like grit to scheme just a little bit bigger.