For years Hollywood has been making live action movies about villains, and this summer saw animated features take up that some motif in two different films, Megamind and Despicable Me. The latter of these two films has just been released on Blu-ray, meaning that we can all take home a villain of our very own this holiday season.
Starring Steve Carell as the voice of Gru, a dastardly super-villain with a vaguely Eastern European accent, the film is about one man's plot to steal the moon. Yes, that's right he wants to steal the moon and he actually has a great way to go about it – he's going to steal a shrink ray and then borrow money from the Bank of Evil to finance his building of a rocket which he can then fly to the moon, shrink, and hold for ransom. This is an animated comedy, it need not revolve around anything remotely rational, practical, feasible, or even possible, and what's more, despite – or because of – the foolishness, it all works.
A wrench gets thrown into Gru's plan when another super-villain, Vector (Jason Segel), steals the shrink ray from Gru. Gru isn't the sort to let that sort of thing stop him, he just adds a couple of extra steps to his plan – he adopts some girls so that they can deliver cookies to Vector as a diversion so that Gru can steal the shrink ray back. In rather obvious fashion, Gru grows to love to the girls and has some trouble reconciling his desire to steal the moon and be evil with this new found love.
From beginning to end, Despicable Me is a weird trip full of telegraphed but still funny jokes and a solid emotional core. From the moment that Gru first adopts Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher), there can be no doubt in any member of the audience's mind that Gru is going to fall in love with them, learn to be a (slightly) better person, and that everything will work out in the end. No, the only question is whether or not co-directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud can create enough amusing moments before the end to make the trip worthwhile. The screenplay by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (with a story from Sergio Pablos) does, in fact, make that happen thanks to a trip to an amusement park; a visit from Gru's mom (Julie Andrews); and the film's version of Disney's comic relief animal sidekicks, Gru's Minions.
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