‘Despicable 3’ funny as ever
Subplots aplenty but Minions, Gru provide slapstick in franchise’s latest release
(6) DESPICABLE ME 3. Directed by: Kyle Balda, Pierre Coffin. Starring: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Trey Parker, Steve Coogan, Julie Andrews, Jenny Slate, Andy Nyman (voices). Showing at: Baywest, Boardwalk, Hemingways, Walmer Park. Reviewed by: Robbie Collin.
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 necessarily get when queueing for one, apart from Minions, in the same way as you do for, say, a Lego Movie – a franchise that set out its all-gags-blazing aesthetic in the opening 0.3 seconds of its first instalment.
That said, there was a memorably lovely sequence in the original Despicable Me (2010) in which uber-grouch Gru (voiced, then and now, by Steve Carell) takes his three adopted daughters to a seaside carnival: the foursome board a roller-coaster, Pharrell Williams fades up on the soundtrack, and Gru tries and fails to stifle his own excitement while the world flies past in a pastel-coloured rush.
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 instalment), and outside of it, in Sing, The Secret Life of Pets, and the animation house’s other injection-moulded side-projects. But Despicable Me 3 often comes close – a welcome turn of events that has less to do with the story at hand, which is as bitty and frivolous as ever, than a new-found sense of warmth and wonder in the computer-generated animation itself. It’s evident straight away in a fizzy prologue which tees up the bad guy du jour: a fallen child star called Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker) whose villainous modus operandi, along with his taste in clothes and music, is heavily 1980s-themed.
This means self-inflating bubble-gum bombs, a keytar cannon that shoots out weaponised Van Halen riffs, flippers that allow the wearer to moonwalk over water, and more – ideas no less gimmicky than the fart gun and rocket-powered ballgown of previous instalments, but which are brought to life with more rainbow exuberance and tighter comic rhythms than the series has previously mustered.
This goes double, literally, once Gru and his long-lost blond twin Dru (who’s also voiced by Carell) join forces, in complimentary black and white bodysuits, to retrieve a giant rose diamond Bratt has pinched from a Paris museum.
It’s consistently funny, with the kind of well-orchestrated slapstick moments where you can actually feel the stick slap. As for the Minions, they’re mostly hived off in a subplot of their own, in which the performance of a big Gilbert and Sullivan-inspired number on primetime television leads directly to incarceration.
In addition to Gru’s fraternal reunion and the Minions’ adventures, there’s a subplot in which Gru’s new wife, Lucy, (Kristen Wiig) bonds with his eldest daughter, Margo, (Miranda Cosgrove) and another in which the two younger girls, Edith and Agnes, search the woods near Dru’s palatial abode for a unicorn.
All four have their moments without individually amounting to very much, and are chopped between so haphazardly, it’s as if the film keeps tripping over its own shoelaces in the hurry to get where it wants to be next. – The Telegraph