The Forgettable Despicable Me 3 Lacks Creativity And Laughs

As if it wasn't already clear with the last two follow-ups in this franchise, the Despicable Me movies can now stand alongside 21st century animated entities like the Shrek and Ice Age movies as franchises that started out with a great movie before descending into repetitive mediocrity. All the humor and even heart of the first Despicable Me has long since evaporated prior to this newest entry in the ongoing Gru saga, Despicable Me 3, entering theaters. Now, all we've got is references to past movies, a poorly handled plot and unfunny Minion antics. I'd say the franchise is on autopilot but that would indicate it's still moving. It's more like the Despicable Me movies have just been parked in a grimy parking spot for a few years now, not even doing the slightest bit of movement.


The weirdest aspect of this new movie is just how thoroughly scattered is as a motion picture. It's like there were six or seven separate ideas pitched for the plotline of a prospective third Despicable Me movie, and instead of just picking out one, they smushed them all together despite the fact that the vast majority of them don't have any impact on each other. It's like a bunch of short films you'd find on the bonus features section of the Despicable Me 3 have been glued together in the futile hopes of getting a movie out of such a haphazard process. The main-ish plotline involves Gru (Steve Carell) being fired from his job at the Anti-Villain League after he fails to catch notorious baddie Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker).

His new wife, Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig), also gets the boot and while the duo grapples with unemployment, Gru discovers he has a twin brother named Dru (also voiced by Carell) he never knew about. Dru wants Gru to help him become a villain, just like their father and also just like Gru used to be. Gru decides to fulfill Dru's desire for thievery by enlisting him in a mission to steal back the diamond Bratt stole in hopes that getting that diamond back will get him his Anti-Villain League job back. Other storylines we see throughout include Lucy trying to learn to be a mom to Gru's three daughters, Gru's youngest daughter, Agnes (Nev Scharrel) looking for a real-life unicorn, constant standalone scenes with Bratt preparing for a big doomsday plan of his and an entirely disconnected recurring sub plot with Gru's Minions going to prison.

That scattershot summary makes the movie sound exactly as erratic conceptually as it is in execution. Despicable Me 3 is constantly hopping about from one plotline to another, none of which interact or tie into each other all that much, seemingly in the hopes that just having a lot of frenetic activity transpiring on-screen will keep the youngest kids happy. A handful of mildly humorous moments emerge amongst the multitude of storylines (despite having a poorly-written character to work with, Kristen Wiig has a couple of fun line deliveries) but it's all just adds up to a bunch of hyperactivity with no real point to it and far too few laughs to justify the lackadaisical structure.

Seriously, if this movie just brought the laughs, the sloppy storytelling would be easy as pie to overlook, but there's barely anything in here that registers a smirk. Gru's interactions with his newly discovered twin brother Dru (who's far more optimistic and hairy than Gru) are more rote than uproarious, the assorted requisite gags with the Minions feel all too predictable and the animation of the various characters feels too stiff to even get some light chuckles out of their hyper-exaggerated body language, something even those similarly mediocre Hotel Transylvania movies are able to accomplish. Even a baddie obsessed with the 1980's just goes through a checklist of the usual 1980's pop culture references instead of bringing some more unique gags to the table when it comes to referencing that particular era.

Despicable Me 3, as a movie, just feels like it came off an assembly line with no real creativity, energy or fun to mitigate its paint-by-numbers nature. The gags, the animation, the various Pharrell Williams songs, they all feel too familiar to register as anything interesting. To be fair, it's more bland and forgettable than outright bad, for sure, but that doesn't really erase the myriad of problems that plague this newest entry in the Despicable Me franchise. The best thing I can say for it is that it doesn't take the series to an all-time low in quality but that's only because it resides in the same terrain of mediocrity the other Despicable Me follow-ups occupy.