DESPICABLE ME

“DESPICABLE ME” (Voices of Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Russell Brand & Julie Andrews)

I don’t know if it was due to the fact that the last film I saw was the incredibly boring ‘Inception’, but I was very entertained by this cute little cartoon movie. Much better than the lauded ‘Toy Story 3’; ‘Despicable Me’ scored a respectable 19 on my laff-o-meter & I also found the sappy ending to be quite touching – probably because the film made me laugh so I forgave it for the predictable outcome.
‘Despicable Me’ worked on practically every level; I liked Gru (Steve Carell) the openly evil super-villain who goes to the Bank of Evil (formerly known as Lehman Brothers) to borrow money to support his dastardly plans to ‘shock the world’.
When Vector (Segel) his personality-challenged nerd competitor steals the great pyramids of Egypt, Gru comes up with a plan to steal the moon (by shrinking it) to top Vector’s feat.
Other than mad scientist, Dr. Nefario, Gru’s crew consists entirely of small egg shaped creatures he calls minions. The minions are cute & loveable & yet I liked them anyway. I was shocked to see that Dr. Nefario was voiced by Russell Brand; I saw his name in the opening titles & kept waiting for an evil/mad British scientist to come onto the scene, but no such English accented villain appeared. & using a big name star like Julie Andrews to voice Gru’s mother was rather pointless as the woman never says more than one word sentences.
3 cute, but quirky orphan girls enter Gru’s world when they are able to gain entry into Vector’s secret hideaway by selling him cookies. I liked the characters in this story so much, they even got away with using a horrible Bee Gees song (“You Should Be Dancing”) & I not only didn’t mind, the scene made me laugh! Gru tells his elderly inventor that he wants him to build cookie robots & Dr. Nefario thought he said ‘disco’ robots.
The minions, the girls; Margo, Edith & Agnes, Gru’s reading of bedtime stories, in fact, everything in this film worked for me – or was it just because NOTHING worked for me in ‘Inception’ so I was begging to be entertained for a change? Who knows? But I consider this to be one of the better animated movies (Of course nothing can touch ‘South Park: Bigger, Longer & Uncut’) but it is right up there with ‘Up’ & ‘The Simpsons Movie’ as a feature length cartoon that I, as an adult without children, felt was well worth seeing...
Now if we can just get those people who made the mistake of having offspring to leave the noisy little brats at home I might enjoy more of these ‘kiddie’ flicks...