Despicable Me… the first and only good one.
A true antihero that defies Illumination’s norms of bad.
Last year I came up with the idea of rating my favourite films from 3 different western animation studios, this year however won’t go the same way as the well of animation studios in which I have a favourite for has dried up, Sony have a handful of greats but I can’t quite decide a winner from them and Aardman seemingly have no bad films but none of them blew me away either, their films range from 6 to 8 out of 10 and their best ones are very similar in quality to each other (Arthur Christmas possibly notwithstanding as I was saving watching it for literally tonight) however there is one animation studio that I have a favourite for, if only because it’s the only truly good film they made, Illumination are generally not very good at making good quality movies, they are driven by cash over creativity and they found out all too soon that lacking the latter doesn’t stop you from making boatloads of the former; however the first film they made is unique in that it was made with some actual care and effort that is very rare in their other films.
When I first watched this I wasn’t expecting much and that low expectation led to me not realising just what makes it work until the bit where [ISPOILER]Gru destroys the game at the carnival as punishment for it being rigged, earning Agnes the plush unicorn she wanted,[/ISPOILER] it was this moment when I realised that the film is actually good and I was doing myself a disservice by expecting the worst from it.
The story here is actually well written, NANI!!!! a film from the harbingers of the screaming yellow pills, having a good story…??? I was not expecting this from the film but here it is (something we cannot expect from other Illumination titles unfortunately) the story of how Gru adopts the three girls originally with the intention to use them as part of his plan, only to form a fatherly bond with them over the course of the film that makes him question his own villainy, all while he still has the goal of stealing none other than the moon, holds up to a high level Dreamworks or Pixar film, in fact the film feels like a hybrid of the two studio’s styles.
The film has actual setup and payoff at play as well as emotional scenes that are not forced or clumsily implemented, one golden example is[ISPOILER] how we see flashbacks to a young Gru trying to impress his mother only for her to belittle him at every opportunity, even when he builds an actual working rocket, later on Gru is constantly asked to read a bedtime story to the girls and eventually gives in to the pressure and does so, a line near the end of the book has the mother of the three little kittens in the book saying that she loves them with all her heart, without any additional words, only Gru’s facial expressions we can see how he makes the comparison with his own mother who was dismissive and standoffish,[/ISPOILER] this scene is genius because it is well set up and respects the viewer’s intelligence in a way that feels like what we would expect in a top end Pixar movie, not Illumination.
Another thing this film has that I haven’t noticed in any other Illumination movie are little details, one I noticed was the [ISPOILER]Gru Ray player[/ISPOILER] that plays the music during the final scene, were this joke rubbed in your face it could be pretty irksome but it is kept as a little detail and therefore is actually funny.
My favourite scene of all though has to be the moon heist itself, it may be the only Illumination scene to actually give me goosebumps, the camera work and soundtrack here gives the scene a sense of scale that is phenomenal, if not for an unsolicited and tonally inconsistent werewolf clip dropped in the middle of it then this may have been a perfect scene.
But of course, this is still a Despicable Me film and therefore it comes bundled with the minions, perhaps the most irksome inventions of the 2010s yet here, even they are not too bad and even contribute to the story in a meaningful way, the scene where [ISPOILER]they all pitch in to fund the rocket[/ISPOILER] is easily the best these guys have gotten.
Although I have a lot of good things to say about this film, even here there are a fair number of detractors, the humour can be funny at times but other times it resorts to rather infantile jokes such as Nefario’s interpretation of a dart gun, the minions may be at their best here but they are still pretty annoying at times, the karaoke scene at the supermarket, for instance, is the sign of much darker times ahead for them, also you may like or hate Vector but I found him to be irritating and I didn’t find his jokes funny at all, your mileage may vary here but I feel that the only thing the second film did better than the first was the villain… the actual villain that is.
Overall the film is easily Illumination’s best, predominantly because the difference in quality between their first and second best films is huge, if it weren’t for some infantile jokes and the minions being minions during some scenes, I would have rated this even higher but I still think it’s worthy of an.
8/10
