Despicable Me 4's Biggest Flaw: Too Much Plot Potential

Four official films and Two Minions spin-offs in, the world featured in Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud's 2010 animated comedy My favorite villain Somehow it still has enough punch to drive its setting. There is inherently a lot Narrative and comic potential in a world where supervillains run network conventions and schools for young aspiring villains, and treat being a Big Bad like a day job.

But Despicable Me 4 suffers from a strange problem: this world has too much Rather than focusing on a few threads, Renaud and the rest of the filmmakers attempt to tackle a bunch of different plot lines without fully exploring any of them, or even connecting them in any meaningful way.

(Editor's note: This review contains minor setting spoilers. Despicable Me 4.)

Despicable Me 4 The film opens with Gru (Steve Carell), a supervillain turned family man, and his family going into a witness protection program after Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell), a cockroach-themed villain, escapes from a maximum-security prison. Maxime, who happens to be Gru’s high school rival, goes after him, and Gru, his wife, and their seemingly ageless children assume false identities as the Cunninghams, a perfectly normal family living in an upper-middle-class suburban neighborhood. Meanwhile, Maxime and his estranged femme-fatale girlfriend, Valentina (Sofia Vergara), pursue Gru in a giant cockroach-themed airship. Oh, and some of the Minions get superpowers.

All of these threads have a lot to explore: any one of them could be developed into a weighty main plot, but instead, all the potential hooks are glossed over. None of them are given enough time to develop into anything truly engaging or with enough connective tissue to hold the moving parts together.

And there are even more subplots that run throughout the film. The family's preppy pre-teen neighbor, Poppy Prescott (Joey King), is actually an aspiring supervillain who admires Gru and blackmails him into helping her achieve supervillain status. Gru and his secret agent wife, Lucy (Kristen Wiig), try to fit in among their country club neighbors. The Minions form a superhero team. Gru and Lucy's youngest daughter, Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan), faces a moral dilemma for lying about her identity. The reason the villain hates Gru specifically is because of a grudge over that school's ninth-grade talent show for aspiring bad guys.

Think about it: there is a the whole school for the would-be villains, hidden away in the mountains like a baddie's Hogwarts, and treated as a background piece. Similarly, none of the other plot points that are engaging on their own are explored in any meaningful way. They all seem separate, too, never really intersecting. The only connective tissue is the series of physical gags.

Despicable Me 4The film's physical comedy remains top-notch, with some recurring gags and background laughs. There's one particularly hilarious sequence in which the Mega Minions try (and fail miserably) to save several people in the city. That scene is filled with great jokes, but it goes nowhere. The Mega Minions, so hyped in the film's marketing and trailers, barely have any scenes. Even when they're built up to the film's big climax, they only appear for a split second.

Despicable Me 4 is full of good ideas, many of them that appeal specifically to what people love about these movies: the Minions’ antics, Gru’s villainy versus his normal family life, and the Big Bad’s over-the-top theatrics, among others. But all these bits are jumbled together and not coherent enough to make sense as a story. The movie is discordant, like a group of musicians playing unfamiliar instruments (or a group of — dare I say — Minions given instruments) and trying to make a coherent song. But amidst that chaos, sometimes the music starts to sound good: a jazzy saxophone solo briefly rises above the cacophony. Just grit your teeth and ignore the thumping drums and out-of-tune oboes surrounding it.

Despicable Me 4 will be released in theaters on July 3.

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