Tom McGrath’s animated comedy asks what a villain does once the hero is gone, and answers with 96 brisk, well-built minutes. The jokes are sharper than the story, which runs on rails laid by other films, but Will Ferrell’s blue egomaniac is good company.
Tom McGrath takes the oldest superhero story there is, the baby rocketed away from a dying world, and tells it twice at once. The infant who lands in the mansion grows up to be the hero; the one who lands in the prison yard grows up to be the villain. The film’s question is what the villain is for once he has won. It is a good question for a family comedy, and Megamind holds on to it longer than we expected. It is a good film rather than a great one, and brisker and cleverer than its reputation.
Will Ferrell does the voice at a slight remove from his usual bellow. Megamind learned English from convicts and television, and Ferrell gives him a vocabulary of small, confident errors: Metro City comes out as Metrocity, to rhyme with atrocity, and school gains a syllable. We laughed, properly and more than once, at a blue head the size of a watermelon saying these things with total assurance. The writers, Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons, have understood that he is not wicked so much as an actor who has only ever been offered one part, and the film’s best stretch is the one where the show closes.
That stretch begins after the museum. Megamind has the city, the mayor’s chair and nothing to put in his diary. He spins in the chair, orders the citizens to admire him, and finds that winning has left him with nobody to talk to. We felt a small, unexpected sadness watching it, which is not what we had come to a film with a robot gorilla for. David Cross’s Minion, the fish in the gorilla, is the one who sees it coming, and Cross plays him as an anxious valet rather than a henchman.
Tina Fey gives Roxanne Ritchi the dry patience of a woman who has been kidnapped so often she corrects the villain’s technique. Her scenes with Megamind, once he starts courting her under a borrowed face, are written with more care than any of the action, and Fey and Ferrell play off each other as if they were in the same room, which in animation is rare. Brad Pitt plays Metro Man as a man so used to applause he has stopped hearing it, and the film finds something sharper in him than the spoof suggests; we will leave it there. Jonah Hill’s Tighten, who arrives in the second half, is the one voice that grates, a whine with no joke underneath it.
David James designs Metro City as a clean grid of pale towers and Megamind’s lair as a black warehouse lit blue by its own machines, and the people in both places are long-limbed and thin, with heads out of proportion to their bodies, so a sight gag reads in a second. Michael Andrews cuts the two childhoods into a single montage before the title card and keeps that pace for most of the film; it does not wait to see whether a joke has landed before trying the next. Hans Zimmer and Lorne Balfe write heroic brass at a size the pictures do not need, which is the point, and the pop songs Megamind plays himself on to are chosen exactly as the villain would choose them.
The story is the weak part. It runs on rails laid by Superman (1978) and by a dozen comedies in which a villain discovers he has a heart, and anyone who has read the synopsis above could sketch the last half hour unaided. The climax is the usual thing, a fight over a city with towers coming down and a reporter in peril, and it is the one passage where the camera flails, swinging round the action because the film has run out of jokes to put in front of it. The references will pass over most children, though the gorilla and the mispronunciations are for them.
Against The Incredibles (2004), which every critic reaches for and so will we, it is slighter and less sure of what it feels. Against Despicable Me, out the same year with its own villain in the lead, it is funnier and far better built. It runs 96 minutes and carries a PG. Watch it with the sound up and a child beside you. You will not remember how it ends, and you will remember how he says Metrocity.
