The fourth Gru film is 94 minutes of sketches with a plot stapled on: bright, noisy, sometimes funny, and never in the same story for more than ten minutes. The children will not mind. The adults will check their watches.
Fourteen years after Despicable Me (2010), Gru is a father of four, an employee of the agency that used to chase him, and the lead in a franchise that has run out of things for him to want. Chris Renaud, who directed the first two films with Pierre Coffin, is back; Mike White and Ken Daurio write. What they have made is a run of short comic sketches joined by the thinnest plot that would hold. It is fine. It is also the weakest of the four Gru films, and weak in a way that suggests nobody minded.
The setup is dealt with fast. Gru attends a reunion at his old villain school, where the principal, Übelschlecht, is voiced by Renaud himself, and helps arrest a classmate, Maxime Le Mal. Will Ferrell plays Maxime as a man who has fused himself with a cockroach and is proud of it, and he shouts every line in a French accent a little thicker than Carell’s, which is the joke and it works about half the time. Sofía Vergara, as his girlfriend Valentina, has almost nothing to do. Maxime escapes, and Silas (Steve Coogan) moves the whole family into witness protection in a suburb of large lawns and larger cars.
The best stretch belongs to the Minions, which tells you where the film’s attention is. Five of them are given superpowers and sent to protect a city, and they set about it with the same care they bring to everything, which is none. Pierre Coffin still does all their voices, and the sequence has the timing of a good silent comedy: a rescue that becomes a demolition, a landing that misses the building. We laughed out loud, properly, at one of them discovering what a stretchy arm can do to a lamp post. We laughed again at Carell and Ferrell bellowing a pop song at each other, the only scene in which the two leads seem to be enjoying the same film.
The trouble is everything else, and there is a great deal of it. Margo (Miranda Cosgrove) starts a new school. Lucy (Kristen Wiig) cuts hair, badly. The Prescotts next door (Stephen Colbert and Chloe Fineman) are the sort of people who own a tennis court, and their daughter blackmails Gru into a heist. The baby dislikes Gru and bites him, which is the film’s one thread with any feeling in it, and it gets perhaps six minutes. Tiffany Hillkurtz cuts so that no scene outlasts its gag, which keeps the thing moving and also means that nothing has time to matter. Heitor Pereira’s score is brass and bounce and stays out of the way; the Pharrell Williams songs return and do the work of telling us when to feel good.
Around the hour mark we noticed we had stopped following the plot and were waiting for the Minions to come back. That is not what a Gru film should want from us, and it made us a little sad for Gru, who was once the point. Carell still gives him the gravelly courtesy and the sudden flinches, but the script has him reacting to things for 94 minutes and choosing almost nothing. A villain who adopted three girls to pull off a heist and found he could not give them back was a character. A dad in a polo shirt hiding from a cockroach is a situation.
Despicable Me had one idea and let it turn into a story. Despicable Me 2 (2013) had one idea and a wedding. This has six ideas, each the length of a cartoon short, and White and Daurio never pick one to finish. Most critics have been kinder than we are, and we understand why: the gag rate is high, the colours are loud, and a child will not notice that the film has no middle. We noticed.
It carries a U and runs 94 minutes, which is about right for the amount of story and about twenty minutes too long for the amount of plot. Put it on at home on a wet afternoon. The children will watch the Minions, and you can watch the children.
