Movie Report: Despicable Me
In Gru's first scenes of this animated movie, he pops a little boy's balloon with a pin, petrifies waiting customers at a coffee shop with his freeze ray so he can cut to the head of the line, and crushes cars with a bludgeon-like vehicle that makes SUVs look wimpy. Gru is an arch-villain, and he's feeling pretty good about himself until he gets topped in the Crime of the Century runnings by a rival. He vows to his hordes of yellow pill-shaped minions to get back on top by stealing – wait for it – the Moon! (Cue maniacal laughter.)
Meanwhile, as they say, three little orphan girls trudge around town taking orders for boxes of cookies. Level-headed Margo, instigator Edith, and deeply cute Agnes are essentially slave labor for Miss Hattie, the inert and rotund dictator of the orphanage. Their paths cross when Gru sees a way to use these little girls to infiltrate his rival's lair and steal a shrink ray that would be handy for his planned theft of – wait for it – the Moon!
Gru lives in an Addams-Family-like house, with a pet that is mostly snapping teeth, and leaves beakers of powerful acid lying around, but it's still better than Miss Hattie's place. The girls begin to snuggle their way into Gru's life and one can't help wondering how global villainy and adoption will mix.
In the beginning, Disney created the animated feature-length movie, and it was good. Then Pixar created the first computer-animated feature-length movie, and it was good, too. Now, computer generated images (CGI) are apparently so good that almost anyone can do it. In fact, you'll see many dreadful examples in the trailers of coming attractions before this movie, full of wise-cracking animals and brain-pummeling action.
What makes this movie great isn't the animation itself – which is really good – but the direction and the writing. The direction is mostly restrained and subtle, which perfectly sets up scenes with over-the-top zaniness that is pure Chuck Jones and/or Terry Gilliam. The writing is extremely clever. For example, Gru's main rival is named Vector, because his crimes have both magnitude and direction. The treatment of the children is cheerfully callous, which is hysterically funny because it's so shocking and blatant. And there are really good line readings, as when Gru says about his rival, "Boy, I hate THAT guy."
The movie-makers have succeeded brilliantly at a difficult problem: how to (eventually) make a genuine villain likeable, or at least sympathetic. The movies that do this best (The Godfather and Return of the Jedi come to mind) use several techniques. Make others seem even more evil: the cruel Miss Hattie, Gru's heartless assistant Doctor Nefario, Gru's malicious mother, and an evil banker all fill that bill. Show how he got that way, which they do through brief snippets from Gru's past that are simultaneously grim and hilarious. And show how he changes, which probably reaches its peak when he helps Agnes win a stuffed unicorn at a rigged carnival game, leading to her best line, a shrieked, "It's so FLUFFY!"
So, how will it work out to have a supervillain as a step-dad? Hey, there are worse fates.
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