‘Despicable Me’ does the trick
Print Edition
ONE of the many — and we mean many — subplots in “Despicable Me 3” is about a girl’s obsession with finding a unicorn. The adorable tot spends her waking hours wishing and hoping and dreaming, and she comes close but in the end what she finds is a sweet little goat. It’s very cute, and it does the trick — but it’s still, you know, a goat.
One could say that this third installment in Illumination’s “Despicable Me” series, directed by Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda, shares something with that little goat. When “Despicable Me” first came out in 2010, introducing the world to those squishy, chattering Minions and the gloriously weird pseudo-Slavic deadpan of Steve Carell, it was a unicorn: fresh, inventive, unique. But this third one, leaning on an endless litany of 1980s pop culture references to entertain parents and a whole lot of noisy, forgettable action to please the kids, feels more like that goat. It still does the trick — for now. But it ain’t no unicorn.
Luckily, “Despicable” still has its core characters, especially the invaluable Carell as turtlenecked, spindly-legged Gru, a villain gone straight. Indeed, the filmmakers have found a way to double their key asset’s contribution by introducing Gru’s heretofore unknown twin brother, Dru, also voiced by Carell.
But first, we learn that things are going quite well on the personal front for Gru since we last left him, at the end of “Despicable Me 2,” in newly found marital bliss with the formidable Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig), who’s thrilled to become a mother to the three girls that Gru adopted under nefarious pretenses in the first film. Now, of course, Gru is a doting dad, and Lucy makes five.
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