Despicable Me 3 (Dir. Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda, 1h 30m)

 It's no surprise that I have left Despicable Me 3 nearly a month to a gap in the cinema calendar where there was nothing else showing that I particularly wanted to watch (unlike next week when you people may be getting two reviews rather than one as the summer blockbuster machine kicks up a gear). It's not that I don't like the Despicable Me franchise-the first film is a good family movie about fatherhood and a good pastiche of the super villain archetype, the second, despite minions encroaching on the plot, is a good spy-movie parody, and even prequel Minions is a mindless if harmless kids film. This, the fourth in the series, is very much the same-decently paced, decently made, decently funny fare-the problem is, in an ever more crowded schedule, for all the minion antics, this film simply treads water.

The problems are typified in Gru, and his long-long twin brother (in a double role for Steve Carell), Dru's nemesis, the 1980s-themed, former child actor turned supervillain,  Balthazar Bratt, played by South Park's Trey Parker. This should be a fun character, and certainly at points his weaponry, from sonic beam firing keytar to exploding Rubiks Cube to ever-expanding bubble-gum, is somewhat wellcreated. Bratt himself, like Despicable Me's two previous villains of "guy with shark" and "mexican wrestler", is, however, boring-his plan boils down to recreating an episode of his cancelled s how in which a giant robot version of himself, piloted by himself launches Hollywood into space-he's given very little to do other than stealing a diamond, (twice), and even Trey Parker's acting boils down to little more than the sort of thing you'd get on a bad Power Ranger's series, via Michael Jackson.
But there's more! As with Illumination's previous feature, there's a bad habit forming for this studio of simply lobbing music at the audience in an attempt to make them laugh-Sing, after all, blew a good fifth of its budget on it's soundtrack-and Despicable Me 3 continues this trend. Simply playing, as the film does via keytar fights between Gru and Balthazar, Van Halen's Jump and Dire Straits' Money for Nothing is not itself funny. Between those two songs is about six million copies, and countless radio plays-the sudden appearance of Money for Nothing is not itself funny. If Balthazar or Gru played it badly, or with a strange synth sound,  or changed the lyrics to be about themselves or each other-it would be funny.
 If one of them had accidently pressed a button and started a demo of the keyboard that plays out awkwardly during their dance-off? That would have been funny. If someone had managed to defuse one of Balthazar's bombs by re-scrambling the cube? That...would have been funny. Rubiks Cube bombs, giant robot versions of yourself, drone-i-fied versions of your action figure...none of these are funny in of themselves.

Simply referencing the 1980s...does not make something funny, and it's annoying because this is an increasingly common, increasingly lazy way of making a film-I mean, for christsakes, it's below the Family Guy cutaway gag because at least those actually place real people and figures from popular culture in odd or amusing situations.

Hell, there's one simple way to make Balthazar ten times more interesting-the way this film sloppily puts together its main situations, from Balthazar's backstory to Gru and now wife Lucy's summary firing by their employers, to the ramshackle way in which the duo plus their three adoptive children are placed on an island, meet Dru, and have individual and wacky adventures is surprising given how relatively watchable the first two films are. Balathazar could be made so much more interesting in one simple way. Make him Gru's twin-or rather, make Dru (a character so charmless in his blundering buffoonery that one is forcibly reminded of at least two current politicians) a character played by Balathazar in order to entrap and learn true supervillainy from Gru, make his Eighties theme even more important, to the point that every single line he does is either an eighties quote or reference (most of which Gru doesn't recognise), and make his revenge be upon every other show airing against Evil Bratt, (mysteriously disappearing actors, directors, even crew) and then against the entire studio system. What we get is another disappointing villain. If Despicable Me 4 (and god knows that's almost inevitable now) needs to improve one thing, it's to go with a duo of villains, (perhaps brothers to face off against Dru and Gru), or a much better written villain

The problem is that Despicable Me 3 is so bent upon largely repeating the same "Am I a bad parent, wait now I must deal with this threat, no I am not a bad parent" routine, now split across two characters, that, for all its surprisingly decent aesop about compromise, about teamwork, especially with a sibling, the film barely seems to leave an impact upon our characters. Oldest daughter Margo is given barely a five minute section in which she takes part in some mittel-european, cheese-based festival that seems to be to pair the (young) children off in the village near Dru's palatial house, promptly turns to Lucy for help, and with her assistance sees off a slightly insensitive Eastern (or possibly French) caricature in the form of the boy she accidently becomes engaged to's mother. Agnes meanwhile, with Margo in tow, set off to find a possibly legendary unicorn, and learn to deal with compromise.
In comparison to Despicable Me 2, perhaps the most bizarre move is to have considerably less (or so it feels) of the Minions, who, aside from two surprisingly good song and dance routines, and the construction of a makeshift flying machine, don't do a whole lot-there's a slightly odd flashback from their leader, Mel, who reminises about the halycion days of his early life with Gru, but most of the times, the Minions take a back-seat to proceedings.



And this very much sums the film up-a mix of fixing some mistakes whilst leaving others glaring, of a story that at points is quite touching and in others, barely functioning. The animation flicks between focused and cluttered, the pacing is uneven, with either too little or too much time spent on various moments, the comedy is patchy at best, and too many characters are given too little to do. 3 is not the magic number, and for all its yellow, banana loving charms, this film is in danger of being little more than an also-ran.


Rating: Neutral