Despicable Me (2010, PG)

Rating: Null/10 (3 November 2010)

For kids, Gru is an outlandish villain. More importantly, he has a fun and whimsy minion of little, yellow servants, perhaps another robotic creation of Gru's associate, Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand), or a cartoon species of some sort. They look like Twinkies with human features (little arms, little legs, huge eyes) and they wear worker outfits (protective glasses, blue overalls, work gloves). They mostly act like kids, but they are obedient to their boss, Gru.
Gru shows all the signs of losing his touch. He was once a despicable villain, but now he's mostly grouchy and unsuccessful. He reacts negatively against things that annoy old people: he uses his freeze gun on other customers to get around waiting in lines, he threatens his neighbor about a dog dirtying the lawn, and he warns three little girls to avoid making any annoying sounds. The ultimate death blow is his failure to go green (he drives in the worst pollution machine on the road) and his failure to conform (his lawn is dead and his house probably violates every local law in existence). Mix his old age rage and anti-green offenses with a bit of dark demeanor, antisocial attitude, and mean mom, and you get the basics of his villainy.
In other words, he's not very despicable as advertised. He wasn't nearly as funny as one might expect from the trailers and title of the movie, but it doesn't ruin the movie in the least. It still has lots of little witty details, funny side characters, and cool gadgets. No one truly expects him to be bad in a kids movie anyway. No doubt his character will pull in an audience looking for a bad guy in the star position, but it wouldn't necessarily be any greater than if a well known, nice superhero was the star (which is a common misconception: just look at the popularity of Spider-Man or Superman).
Far funnier is Gru's adversary, Vector. Gru wants to shrink and steal the moon to regain his position as the greatest of all villains. However, he can't deploy his plan because Vector (Jason Segel), a ridiculous, inventor villain, laughs his way to stealing the shrink gun. Vector is a geeky, rich kid who, when he isn't one upping Gru by stealing the pyramids, invents worthless weapons or sits around watching TV. Perhaps someday he would get around to stealing the moon for his own glory (and lucrative prospects). He's much more despicable than Gru, and Jason Segel (his voice) makes him sound something like Jon Lovitz, an egoistic loon. He certainly doesn't make intelligent plans. Vector's great accomplishment is to have better results copying Gru's tactics and thwarting Gru's plans.
Gru is just the opposite. Dark, serious, devious, he's a hard working, constantly scheming villain from the suburbs who's had bad luck. Steve Carell voices him with a menacing accent that he reportedly takes from a mixture of Ricardo Montalban and Bela Lugosi. But the truest and most villainous characters in the entire movie are the evil, underground bankers (named Lehman Brothers) that refuse to fund Gru's moon ploy unless they see the shrinking gun in his possession.
Being him, Gru devises another plan to take advantage of Vector's weakness for cookies. He adopts three girls from an orphanage to distract Vector and try to steal back his shrinking gun. This sets in motion a typical story of his reversal from insensitive to sensitive, dark to colorful (his spacesuit becomes pink after the girls mix in their clothes with his), or, as the tagline says, "superbad to superdad". Some of these sequences are enjoyable, especially with Gru putting out bowls of food for the kids, and having to read them a bedtime story about kittens.
The youngest of the girls, Agnes (Elsie Fisher, voice), is the funniest of the girls. She fearlessly dominates the relationship over Gru and his vicious pet. She's particularly funny at an amusement park, which not only gives the audience an easy thrill for the roller coasters on the big screen but also allows Agnes to win a unicorn toy and joyously exclaim, "it's so fluffy," with the amusement park game burning in destruction behind her.
The various side characters around Gru were funniest. A few of the best jokes are at the expense of the little yellow minion sidekicks and Dr. Nefario, an old genius who has hearing problems (he mistakenly invents the wrong gadgets sometimes). The film also has its share of fun gadgets down in Gru's secret lab, including a NASA like mission control setup. It may disappoint some adults expecting a more humorous and evil villain, but it's very watchable, fun, and fast paced.
The image quality of "Despicable Me" didn't seem negatively impacted by the 3D treatment. The 3D was more enjoyable and noticeable than in "The Last Airbender", but not so frequent that you get a huge advantage. The audience seemed to enjoy the film, but many of them had to stay for the credits since the yellow minion give a nice send off.