Despicable Me - Review

Despicable Me - ***

Sitting in the theatre and waiting for the movie to begin, I started realizing that my showing of Despicable Me was populated by a large percentage of moms and elementary school-age children. But it didn't hit me that this is the audience until there was a slight joke in the movie that went over 99% of the audience.


Despicable Me tells the story of a self-professed super-villain named Gru (voiced by Steve Carell) who has, compared to most movie villains, a relatively minor goal: to be known as the greatest super-villain of all time. Why? It's a hobby, I suppose. After all, what's the point of putting your time and money into an operation if you don't want to be the best? He certainly doesn't seem to make a lot of money off of stealing the Times Square jumbotron (complete with NBC logo). Maybe he just likes being evil. You don't just walk into a coffee shop and freeze-ray everyone lined up in front of you just because you want a coffee.


But when another super-villain one-ups him by stealing the pyramids, he has to shift things into high gear. By stealing the moon. How? Shrink-ray. He's going to fly a rocket to the moon, shrink the moon, grab it, and hold it ransom. At least, he happened to mention that he'll get anything he wants. But in order to succeed, he has to get a bank loan. What bank would give him a loan to complete this plan?

Here's where that joke comes in. I don't feel bad spoiling it because it's not a really big joke, but it's still clever. Here goes. Gru heads to the bank, enters through a secret entrance to a giant underground complex with a giant underground door that reads: BANK OF EVIL (formerly Lehman Brothers). The fact that I heard very few parents makes me wonder. Maybe they're just there to make sure the kids don't scream or something. I don't know.

Anyway, when the plan fails (don't worry, that's the set-up), his new plan necessitates the adoption of three adorable little girls. The girls have no idea that he's a super-villain--but there sure are hints. Oh, boy, are there hints. The girls have an idolized vision of what their adoptive parents (yes, plural) will look and be like. But it's no surprise that when they spot Gru, they go with it because he still seems better than the mean Miss Hattie that runs the orphanage.

You can guess what happens when Gru is forced to spend time with the girls, so I won't mention it. Just let me say that seeing the imagination in Gru's lair is wonderful, including the retrospectively-laborious process of going to his lair from the main floor of his suburban-yet-gothic (seriously, it sticks out like sore--or necrotic--thumb) home.

And the minions. I won't be surprised if these tennis ball-looking plush toy-seeming little guys end up on shelves in toy stores (marketing. Go figure). But don't let that scare you from them. They're cute little guys who do most of Gru's grunt work and are happy to do it (working for Gru must have one hell of a benefits package if that underground complex of his includes room for a spin class).

But why did I mention that barely-noticed Lehman Brothers joke? The movie has very few (in fact, I think that was the only one. Maybe.) noticeable jokes for adults. But it's enough fun that parents with kids won't mind watching it. I don't have kids, and I had fun. But I did say "noticeable." Well, the rival super-villain Vector (voiced by Jason Segel) has an eerily similar look to Bill Gates (if Bill Gates didn't grow up and became a super-villain), and the whole idea of an underground society where super-villains scheme and invent just makes me wonder how far around the world this extends.

But I still can't figure out something about the shrink ray. I know it shrinks the size of an object, so I assume it would shrink all the molecules and atoms that make up the object, too. But you'd think that if you shrank the moon, that mass would still be there, and you'd end up orbitting it like a black hole. But then-- oh, forget it.