Despicable Me: Gru Sniffing

It’s never quite clear why Gru, the main character of Despicable Me, lives where he does — in the middle of the city, in a grim, brooding mansion crammed into the middle of a bunch of bland row houses. As an antisocial supervillain with evil plans to shrink the moon, steal it, and hold it for ransom, he has no affection or patience for his neighbours. Surely he’d be happier on a remote island or in the wilderness — somewhere where he’d have the room to build his laboratory instead of having to conceal it deep underground, beneath his neighbours’ backyards for what must be a couple of blocks in every direction. It’s as if the filmmakers fell in love with the Edward Scissorhands image of a mad scientist’s lair situated on a regular big-city street and didn’t bother to imagine what reason a person would have for living this way.

You get the feeling there were plenty of things that the makers of Despicable Me never quite got around to figuring out about this guy, who’s like Uncle Fester crossed with C. Montgomery Burns. On the one hand, he’s a successful enough supervillain to have made the front page of the newspaper on several occasions, but on the other hand, the Bank of Evil turns down his latest loan application because his capers don’t make any money. (It’s also unclear whether the problem is that his evil plans are just pathetic and ill-conceived, or if he takes more of an artist’s approach to supervillainy, committing crimes that are ingenious but which don’t make much in the way of profit.) The story really runs into problems in its third act, when the three adorable little orphan girls Gru has been using as pawns in his evil plan open up their piggy banks for him, a generous gesture that inspires him not to give up on his dream of committing the biggest crime in human history. I think this is supposed to be a sweet, heartwarming moment, except you keep waiting for the scene where the little girls realize Gru is using their money for… you know… evil.

But really, it’s just the fact that Gru is a criminal that I keep stumbling over, conceptually speaking — when Despicable Me focuses simply on Gru’s utter disdain for these little girls and his reluctant metamorphosis into a parent (albeit one with a distinctly Addams Family approach to childcare), it’s a pretty lovable movie. I love the scene where the little girls enter Gru’s house for the first time and notice that he doesn’t just have a lion’s head stuffed and mounted on the wall; the lion has another animal stuffed and mounted in its jaws, and that animal is eating a third animal. The film doesn’t have the sustained comic inventiveness of Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs, but it’s aiming for a similar level of goofiness, especially in the scenes involving Gru’s archnemesis Vector (Jason Segel), whose prize invention is a gun that shoots piranhas. I’ll also admit to laughing at the scene where Gru tells his hard-of-hearing colleague Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) to build him a dart gun, only to receive instead… well, I’ll let you figure out what’s funny and rhymes with “dart.”

Steve Carell, who plays Gru, has devised a marblemouthed Russian baritone for the part that’s unlike anything I’ve heard from him before. He’s an underrated voice artist, with an instinctive talent for vocal caricature — the hyperactive squirrel he played in Over the Hedge is one of the funniest cartoon performances of recent years.

For the most part, Despicable Me feels like a movie that wants to do more than merely go through the motions. When I say that, I’m thinking of the way directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud handle the three orphan girls, Margo, Edith, and Agnes, all of whom are given their own specific, distinctive personalities. (Little Agnes, as voiced by Elsie Fisher, is the film’s scene-stealer — along with Bonnie from Toy Story 3, she’s the prototype for a new kind of female movie character, a little girl who is incredibly cute and girly, but also kind of demented.)

At the same time, you can’t help but be constantly reminded of all the commercial calculation that went into this film, from the logos for NBC and Starbucks to Gru’s “minions,” an army of little sentient yellow cylinders of unexplained origins who live in Gru’s basement and build all of his inventions — but they feel less like characters than a multi-platform branding device.

But if you have to see a slickly packaged piece of family mass entertainment, you could do much worse than Despicable Me. It certainly has the most fun of any recent animated movie when it comes to goofing around with the possibilities of 3-D. The tag that plays during the closing credits, in which two of Gru’s minions take turns seeing how far they can extend themselves from the screen and into the audience’s faces, is particularly delightful. Despicability averted!