Director – Chris Renaud, Co-Director – Patrick Delage, Screenplay – Ken Daurio & Mike White, Story/Based on the , Producers – Brett Hoffman & Chis Meledandri, Music – Heitor Pereira, Songs – Pharrell Williams, CGI Supervisors – Richard Adenot, Laurent de la Chapelle & Boris Jacq, Animation Directors – Pierre-Francois Duhamel & Aymeric Palermo, Art Direction – Olivier Adam & Charlotte Hutchinson. Production Company – Illumination Entertainment.
Voices
Steve Carell (Gru), Kirsten Wiig (Lucy Wilde), Pierre Coffin (Minions), Will Ferrell (Maxime Le Mal), Steve Coogan (Silas Ramsbottom), Joey King (Poppy Prescott), Miranda Cosgrove (Margo), Dana Gaier (Edith), Madison Polan (Agnes), Sofia Vergara (Valentina), Chris Renaud (Principal Übelschlecht), Stephen Colbert (Perry Prescott), Chloe Fineman (Patsy Prescott)
Plot
Gru leads an Anti-Villain League team in a raid on an alumni reunion at his old school Lycee Pas Bon to arrest his old rival Maxime Le Mal, a villain who has fused his DNA with that of a cockroach. AVL then informs Gru that Maxime has escaped. For their protection, Gru, Lucy and the girls are relocated into hiding in at an AVL safe house in the town of Mayflower and given new identities. Meanwhile, the Minions are taken to AVL headquarters for special training. Five of them are selected to be turned into Mega Minions, regular Minions but with the addition of superpowers. Meanwhile, as Gru, Lucy and the girls attempt to maintain their disguises as ordinary people, Gru is identified by Poppy Prescott, the young daughter of his next-door neighbour, who demands as price of her silence that she be inducted into a caper – a raid on the Lycee Pas Bon. However, this threatens to expose their whereabouts.
Despicable Me (2010) was the first released film for the French animation company Illumination Entertainment and proved a surprise hit. Since then, Illumination have become major players in the lucrative theatrical animation stakes with releases that include The Secret Life of Pets (2016) and Sing (2016) and sequels, the Dr Seuss adaptations The Lorax (2012) and The Grinch (2018), and The Super Mario Bros. Movie (2023). However, their bread and butter has been the Despicable Me franchise, which was expanded out in three sequels Despicable Me 2 (2013), Despicable Me 3 (2017) and now Despicable Me 4 here, while the Minions became a pop culture phenomena for a time and been spun off in two films of their own with Minions (2015) and Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022).
The franchise film is the curse of modern Animation. It is where one film is a success and so the studio keep churning out more adventures of the same set of characters, even though many of the stories do not lend themselves to more – Frozen (2013), which is about to release its second sequel, being a perfect example. The Despicable Me series has not quite turned out as bad as the interminable sequels to Ice Age (2002) did. However, it has churned through most of the clichés of these sequels – introducing siblings, giving the character a romantic interest, evil versions of characters, having them settle down (which to be fair that was the premise of the first film) and, as here, having children.
As with the rest of the series, Despicable Me 4 gets much of its laughs out of the manic antics of those Ritalin-deprived kids known as the Minions. These used to be a great deal of fun but through repetition have started to get tiresome, especially the ongoing pranks that continue through the end credits. Nevertheless these do provide some of the film’s most amusing moments – where the changing of the child’s diapers is treated as a Formula One pit stop tire change, or the ongoing gag involving a Minion trapped in a vending machine. On the other hand, when it comes to the point of a subplot that turns Minions into super-powered beings – cue assorted parodies of Superhero Films and seeing their powers go amok – it well and truly feels that the Despicable Me franchise is running out of fresh ideas.
Rivals Maxime (voiced by Will Ferrell) and Gru (voiced by Steve Carell)Minions with supoerpowers – the Mega Minions
The rest of Despicable Me 4 runs by a rehash of the plot trope of the witness protection plot – this is Despicable Me by way of My Blue Heaven (1990) and the comic possibilities of the Mafioso as a fish out of water in suburbia. However, there is surprisingly little done with this beyond a couple of scenes with Gru and his snobby neighbour and a truncated scene with him joining a tennis game at the country club, as well as with Lucy’s disastrous try-out as a hairdresser, which only serves as lead in to a slapstick sequence with her fleeing the angry customer in a supermarket.
There are attempts to introduce new characters. There is Maxime, which the credits reveal to be no less than Will Ferrell hiding behind the outrageous French accent, a childhood rival of Gru’s, but this is a character that never gets to do anything interesting. More interesting is the introduction of Poppy, the next-door-neighbour’s daughter who is a wannabe super-villain who blackmails Gru into a caper scheme. The character holds great promise – she could have been a villain in training or one that Gru spent the film trying to stop going over to the dark side – but barely have they gone on their caper than she is redeemed and helping Gru out in time for the climax. Dropped from the film has been Russell Brand, who has been cancelled these days, and Julie Andrews, who may well be considered too old at age 88.
Much of Despicable Me 4 is taken up by extended slapstick sequences, more so than I ever remember the other films being. This consists of almost any of the scenes involving the Minions. The latter half of the show involves a lot of such slapstick chaos scenes with Lucy in the supermarket; the break-in to the academy; the Mega Minions trying to act as superheroes; Principal Übelschlecht turning up at the house; and Gru fighting against Maxime.
