titledespicableme

Anyone that creates a balloon poodle for an upset child, then pops it in the wee poppet's face, is my kind of guy. Yay for Gru (Steve Carell), an evil genius whose dastardlyness knows no barriers. He happily uses a freeze ray to queue jump at a coffee shop for instance. But as in any business, there's always someone trying to tear you down. To stay number one, Gru and his yellow minions decide to shrink the moon and steal it. Problem is the new kid in town, the equally megalomaniacal Vector (Jason Segal) has the shrink-ray Gru needs to pocket the planet. So starts the entertaining first half of this looney, looney tune. Big on design, big on crazy laughs, Despicable Me also has the requisite blink-and-you'll-miss-them nods at the zeitgeist (such as the Evil Bank Gru visits for a loan – formerly known as Lehman Brothers).

Directors Renaud and Coffin have sharp pencils and even sharper minds that create a wonderfully inspired unreality which doesn't so much pay homage to wild minds of yore (think Jones, Freleng, Groening), so much as remix them. They also add a very human subtext in Gru's need to prove himself to his cold mother (Julie Andrews). Enter the children; three young girls he 'adopts' to sneak his way into Vector's fortress. What he doesn't anticipate is how easily the girls sneak their way into Gru's heart. And that, quite frankly, is despicable.

It's also where the film looses some of it's heat as the directors press all the emotional buttons to elicit a response. To be fair, they do it very effectively, keeping the kids from turning into Disney heroes, leaving Gru and Vector to work out their differences like evil villains ought. The ensuing battles are, particularly in 3D, thrillingly staged. Despicable Me is at it's best when trading in anything-for-a-laugh gags, less so in the sentimental second half as our villain turns into a father. It's not Pixar at its best, yet the film serves its audience well, even if I did feel I'd lost an evil friend to fatherhood.

// COLIN FRASER
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