too much<\/em> potential. Instead of focusing on just a few threads, Renaud and the rest of the filmmakers try to tackle a bunch of different plotlines without exploring any of them fully \u2014 or even connecting them in any meaningful way. <\/p>\n[Ed. note:<\/strong> This review contains slight setup spoilers for Despicable Me 4.<\/em>]<\/p>\n\n
\n Image: Illumination<\/cite>Despicable Me 4<\/em> kicks off with supervillain turned family man Gru (Steve Carell) and his family going into witness protection after cockroach-themed villain Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) escapes maximum security prison. With Maxime, who just happens to be Gru\u2019s high school rival, coming after him, Gru and his wife and apparently never-aging children assume false identities as the Cunninghams, a perfectly normal family living in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood. Meanwhile, Maxime and his aloof femme-fatale girlfriend, Valentina (Sof\u00eda Vergara), hunt Gru down in a giant cockroach-themed aircraft. Oh, and a few of the Minions get superpowers. <\/p>\nAll these threads have a lot to explore: Any one of them could be fleshed out into a load-bearing primary plot. But instead, every single possible hook is simply glossed over. None of them are given enough time to develop into something actually compelling, or with enough connective tissue to hold the moving parts together. <\/p>\n
And there are even more subplots strung throughout the movie. The family\u2019s preppy preteen neighbor Poppy Prescott (Joey King) is actually an aspiring supervillain who admires Gru and blackmails him into helping her achieve supervillain status. Gru and his secret-agent wife, Lucy (Kristen Wiig), try to fit in among their country-club neighbors. The Minions form a superhero team. Gru and Lucy\u2019s youngest daughter, Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan), faces a moral quandary over lying about her identity. The whole reason the villain hates Gru specifically is because of a grudge from their ninth grade talent show at that school for aspiring bad guys.<\/p>\n
\n
\n Image: Illumination<\/cite>Think about that: There\u2019s a whole school<\/em> for aspiring villains, tucked away into the mountains like a bad-guy Hogwarts, and it\u2019s treated as a background set-piece. Similarly, none of the other separately compelling plot points gets explored in a meaningful way. They also all feel separate, never really intersecting. The only connective tissue is the run of physical gags. <\/p>\nDespicable Me 4<\/em>\u2019s physical comedy is still top-notch, with some choice running gags and background guffaws. There\u2019s one particularly hilarious sequence with the Mega Minions trying (and absolutely failing) to save various people around the city. That scene is full of great jokes, but it goes nowhere. The Mega Minions, so hyped in the movie\u2019s marketing and trailers, barely have any scenes. Even when they\u2019re teed up for the movie\u2019s big climax, they only show up for a split second. <\/p>\nDespicable Me 4 <\/em>is full of good ideas, with lots of them specifically appealing to what people like about these movies: Minion antics, Gru\u2019s villain-ness versus his normal family life, and over-the-top Big Bad Guy theatrics among them. But all these bits and pieces are jumbled together and not cohesive enough to make sense as a story. The movie is discordant, like a bunch of musicians playing unfamiliar instruments (or a bunch of \u2014 dare I say \u2014 Minions given instruments) and trying to make a coherent song. But amid that chaos, sometimes the music starts sounding good \u2014 a cool jazzy saxophone solo soars briefly above the cacophony. You just have to grit your teeth and ignore the clanging drums and out-of-tune oboes around it. <\/p>\nDespicable Me 4 <\/em><\/small>is out in theaters on July 3. <\/small><\/p>\n \n
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Image: Illumination And believe it or not, the movie could use more Minions Four official movies and two Minions spinoffs in, the world introduced in Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud\u2019s animated 2010 comedy Despicable Me somehow still has enough steam to power its setting. There\u2019s inherently a lot of narrative and comedic potential in a […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1644,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[18],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1642"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1648,"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1642\/revisions\/1648"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1644"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1642"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1642"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/littlesturgisrally.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1642"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}
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