Despicable Me 4: An Extremely Lot of Nothing

INTRODUCTION: IT'S A BAD MOVIE

(that may have been a better movie originally)

So I saw Despicable Me 4 and it made me upset. I'd seen Despicable Me 1, which I remembered being fine! A fun romp. And while Gru never seemed like a character with three sequels of character development left in him, I still assumed that the bombastic setting of over-the-top themed supervillains could deliver a fun time. I didn't expect it to be good, but I expected it to be competent.

Big mistake!

I need to go over how inane the plot is, how little substance there is to the characters, how utterly confusing every single decision that went into the plot is. It's a movie with no message, no emotional throughlines, not even a coherent plot.

The main plot had potential, but it's completely wasted. The potential is strangled on two fronts: more than half the runtime is given away to scenes that have nothing to do with the core characters, but simultaneously, the scenes those core characters do get don't do anything besides ensure the events of the plot happen. There is no idea that the plot is built around, no internal conflict that puts a character to the test, nothing. The main plot deadlocks almost immediately, leaving both the hero and villain to putter around aimlessly until someone else can wrench it into motion again. The End.

You might assume it's a bad movie because it has Minions in it, which is part of the problem, with a boring C-plot that is both too rushed to do anything interesting AND manages to chew up way too much screen time. It's not the brief pratfall asides which drag the movie down: it's the whole subplot dedicated to superhero Minions that feels like it was supposed to be a separate movie. It butts up against the main plot for time and attention, hamstringing both. This movie's plot ended up sacrificed on the altar of setting up the inevitable Mega Minions spin-off movie.

It's not like the original Despicable Me was deep, but at the very least, we got to see Gru struggle with having to choose between his ambitions and his need for love and desire to be paternal. Gru ended up a different man than he started. It had a little heart to it.

In contrast, Despicable Me 4 is just a zombie of a film. Whatever potential its parts had at one point, they are now merely pieces of a stitched-together corpse. It has no heart, no message, no goal except to put one lumbering plot point in front of the other until it crosses its runtime.

I'm going to go over the main plot, ignoring its various C- and D- plots, as none of them have anything to do with the main plot, not even abstractly. The fact that I can simply leave them out of my description of the main plot without creating any holes in the narrative tells you everything you need to know about them.

Okay, let's start at the beginning.

PART 1: PLOT RECAP

We open on Gru driving a fancy sports car up a treacherous mountain road. It's a neat opening scene! It doesn't do anything besides that, though. It establishes that Gru is awesome, and he drives an awesome car. I think it was intended as a contrast for later scenes, when Gru has to fit in with suburbia and drive a standard family sedan, but that comparison is never actually made. I may be giving Despicable Me 4 the benefit of the doubt where it doesn't deserve it.

He arrives at a creepy castle, home of Lycée Pas Bon (literally "Not Good High School"), for a school reunion. He briefly feuds with an old rival of his, Maxime Le Mal (literally "Maxime the Bad"), before Maxime is called up on stage to receive an award from Principal "Übelschlecht" (literally "bad-tempered"). Maxime reveals that he's given himself the body of a cockroach to greatly enhance his physical strength, speed and durability. This prompts Gru to announce that he's an agent of the Anti-Villain League (AVL) to the entire reunion.

This prompts AVL agents to pour in through a skylight and, with Gru's help, capture Maxime and drag him off to prison, but not before he swears revenge on Gru.

Okay, so, initial questions:

1. What was the point of Gru attending the reunion? What did that accomplish?
2. How did none of the supervillains recognize Gru as an AVL agent? He's been working with the AVL for two whole movies now in an extremely public capacity. How did none of them know about him changing sides?
3. Why do none of the assembled supervillains try to help Maxime when he's being detained? We have a shot of an entire crowd of supervillains just standing and watching as Maxime is hauled away.
4. Why did the AVL choose the school reunion to target Maxime at all? Why wait until he was in a heavily-fortified castle, surrounded by his peers, to make their move? Why not try to intercept him en route?
5. Why does the AVL seem unconcerned with all the other supervillains attending the reunion? Why ONLY arrest Maxime?
6. Why does the AVL allow the Lycée Pas Bon to continue operating at all? Why are they letting a school that trains supervillains to otherwise operate without interference?

I don't like to nitpick movies! I don't want to come across like I believe in any kind of CinemaSins-style reviewing of movies, where the quality of the movie is determined primarily by how many plot holes you can ding. But I need to know why things I'm watching are happening. I want to suspend my disbelief, but that's hard when no aspect of the scene makes sense to me.

I feel like it wouldn't take too much effort to contrive an answer to some of these: have Gru use a gadget on a control panel to disable the security system, explaining why they needed him on the inside. Have him use a gadget to isolate Maxime from the rest of the supervillains or something. A few contrived gadgets would be better than nothing.

(There's also a missed opportunity to set up a later scene I want to talk about, but I'm going to stick a pin in for now, and come back to it when we get to that later scene.)

The whole scene just doesn't make sense at all, from any angle, at any moment. It doesn't make sense that none of the other attendees knew about Gru switching sides beforehand, and it doesn't make sense for the AVL to blow a top agent's perfect insider status for no discernable advantage. Things just happen in this movie. It almost feels like improv, as if the writers were just stringing together plot beats, with no opportunity to go back and revise if a scene ended up not making sense.

Just to establish something quickly here: Gru now has an infant son, Gru Jr., who is cold and malicious towards Gru for no provided reason. For each scene I describe after this, pretend I included a bit where Gru Jr. does something to hurt or scare his father, while Gru continues to dote on him.

The next scene has the director of the AVL show up to Gru's house and play a video where Maxime swears revenge on Gru and his family, informing them after the video ends that Maxime escaped yesterday. Did he seriously wait a day to tell Gru that a deadly mutant supervillain was on his way to kill him? Do phones not exist in the Despicable Me universe? Was the safety of Gru's family not worth driving over the night before?

Anyway, the AVL decides that Gru and his family aren't safe, telling them that they must adopt false identities in a suburban town along with just three of Gru's Minions, while the rest of the Minions go live at AVL headquarters, until the AVL is able to find and detain Maxime again.

Maxime, meanwhile, is hunting down Gru by... flying around in a giant cockroach ship, He's apparently just flying around the whole of the United States of America, looking at the ground with a periscope.

And so the Maxime plot thread immediately stalls out. And since Gru doesn't do anything unless he's forced to, the whole main plot is deadlocked until we get a contrivance that puts Maxime back on Gru's tail. That'll be an hour from now, just in time for the climatic final battle, which the writers needed Maxime to be present for.

Okay, so, more questions:

1. Why can't Gru and his family just go live at an AVL headquarters? They have massive, city block-sized offices around the globe. If they can house hundreds of Minions, surely they have some living space for two adults, three kids and a baby?
2. If Gru can't go live at AVL headquarters, why do he and his wife need to have jobs? Does he really need the solar panel salesman salary? He's supposed to be in hiding, why is he being forced to interact with the public?
3. How is Gru supposed to avoid recognition? He's a former supervillain who stole the moon! He's been a public agent of the AVL for two movies now! He has a super-recognizable face, and HE HAS SOME OF HIS MINIONS WITH HIM. His iconic, highly-marketable Minions!! You'd expect him to get recognized on the walk to the safe house!
4. Why does the AVL need time to find Maxime? They say capturing him is their top priority, but he's aimlessly flying about in a massive rocket-propelled cockroach mecha. Just search Twitter for "cockroach" and you've found him in under 30 seconds.
5. Do the writers understand how large the US is? Do they understand there are hundreds of millions of people in the US, and trying to find one guy by visually inspecting each person in turn is not a reasonable strategy?
6. Did it cross Maxime's mind that his plan would be foiled by Gru staying indoors? Or wearing a large hat?

But whatever! Gru moves to the suburbs and is immediately recognized by his neighbor's daughter. And I mean immediately, literally on the initial walk from the car to the safehouse. Yeah, that was foreshadowing back at point #3! And yeah, him getting identified makes sense, because he's Felonius Gru! The guy who stole the moon! I feel like his face would be pretty well-known!

The next scene has the director of the AVL impressing upon Gru the importance of keeping his true identity a secret. It's not played for dramatic irony, even though we know Gru has already been made. My guess is this scene made more sense in an earlier draft of the movie, one which focused more on Gru trying to live a double life of both an agent and a suburban father. I'll go into detail later.

Anyway. The neighbor kid, Poppy, turns out to be an aspiring supervillain. She's also the movie's only interesting character, and I genuinely believe if the entire movie had revolved around her and Gru (and Gru Jr.), it could have gone to interesting places. Alas, it doesn't, and does not.

She threatens to expose Gru if he doesn't help her kidnap Lycée Pas Bon's mascot / the principal's pet, a honey badger named Lenny, believing that doing so will guarantee her acceptance to the prestigious supervillain school. I'm not sure how her blackmail is supposed to work, considering the AVL could just move Gru to a different safehouse, but whatever. Gru reluctantly goes along with it.

The two of them steal a hot air balloon belonging to her dad's car dealership and fly to Lycée Pas Bon that very night. Which surprised me.

It's one thing that Lycée Pas Bon, situated in what looks like the Swiss Alps and run by someone named "Übelschlecht" turns out to be in the US. That's fine. I don't think the twisty mountain roads that Gru drift-turns through at the beginning of the movie exist in the US, but whatever. It's campy, it's pulpy, it's a world of highly-thematic supervillains. The writers have license to plop a clearly-European supervillain school smack dab in the middle of the US if they want.

But did the AVL really have to rehouse Gru within spitting distance of the place where he humiliated Maxime? Wouldn't the odds of Gru being identified by a supervillain be way higher in close proximity to a school that trains supervillains??

Wow, maybe Maxime's "just fly around until you see him" plan wasn't so stupid after all.

And by the way, Gru doesn't seem to have any thoughts about helping someone attend the school that trained the man who is currently out to hurt him and his family. You'd think maybe that would bother him! You'd think he'd try to talk Poppy out of her desire to go there! But no, his only objection seems to be that he doesn't feel like going through with the bother of breaking in.

Anyway, Gru is forced to bring Gru Jr. with him in the hot air balloon for some reason. And also his bag of infiltration gadgets is identical to Gru Jr.'s diaper bag. This results in -- you won't believe it -- him bringing the wrong bag on the heist, and also in the Minions bringing Gru Jr. along for the heist, and also also causes them to lose the hot air balloon. Oops! What an unlikely series of events! Poppy starts to lose hope, but Gru impresses her by improvising with supplies from the diaper bag to get past the Lycée Pas Bon's defenses.

Okay, so time to go back for that earlier pin. You know what would have been super cool? If, in the opening scene of the movie, we got to see how wicked and brutal the school's defenses were. At the time, it would seem like the movie was just showing off how evil Gru's old school is. Then, when Gru is blackmailed into helping Poppy break in, we could go, "oh shit! We know how serious its defenses are! How will Gru ever get past them?" Setup and payoff.

We also could have had Gru reliant on AVL gadgets in the first scene, making it seem like he'll be helpless during the break-in after he loses his bag of AVL infiltration gadgets. Gru could then go back to his roots, engineering the heist with what little he has on hand. Setup and payoff. Setup and fucking payoff!

But there's just none of that in this movie! There is so much I'm leaving out because it is utterly inconsequential. I'll mention the movie's C-plot and D-plots later, but it's not worth it right now. None of them have anything to do with what's going on, not even abstractly.

Gru Jr., a literal baby, manages to salvage the mission twice, first by getting past some security lasers and disabling them, and second by managing to pacify a rampaging Lenny, something that surprises and impresses Gru. The three of them manage to steal an aircraft and escape before Principal Übelschlecht can catch them. Poppy, delighted with the caper, swears to keep Gru's secret safe.

Except Gru's secret is already no longer safe, thanks to Poppy! Lenny is wearing a tracking collar! Übelschlecht immediately contacts Maxime to give him Gru's location, which is great news for the audience: the Maxime plot can move forward again! Hooray!

Übelschlecht arrives at Gru's home ahead of Maxime, where Poppy is babysitting for Gru's kids. Poppy spots her on their front porch, but chooses to slip out with the honey badger rather than protect or even warn the children she's in charge of. She doesn't even bother to contact Gru, who is off playing tennis. Fuck you, Poppy! You're supposed to respect Gru by this point! You can't say you respect him and then sacrifice his children to the supervillain who YOU pissed off!

Instead, Gru is alerted by one of his kids, who noticed that Übelschlecht called Gru by his real name. Gru and his wife ditch their country club date with the neighbors, arriving home just in time to protect their adopted daughters from the enraged principal.

In the ensuing fracas, Maxime shows up and kidnaps the unattended Gru Jr. (great job, Poppy), forcing Gru and Poppy to pursue him in his cockroach ship. The two manage to force Maxime to land on top of a building under construction, where Maxime reveals he has already turned Gru Jr. into a brainwashed cockroach-hybrid.

His awesome cockroach ship then falls through the half-built building before it can do anything cool, leaving Gru to fight Maxime one-on-one.

Maxime effortlessly beats up Gru before knocking him off a crane, leaving him dangling by his fingers. While Maxime stomps on his hand, Gru Jr. manages to break free of the mind control and rescue his father. The father-son duo then knock Maxime off the building, defeating him. Gru Jr. is de-cockroached off-camera before the next scene, sparing Gru from having to react to his son being part-insect. Credits roll.

Okay, so.

I guess before I give my thoughts on the movie's themes, I should recap those D-plots I kept hinting at. I would just leave them out, but there are too many of them to simply ignore them altogether. Does it seem like the main plot -- Gru visits Lycée Pas Bon, gets sent to suburbia, returns to Lycée Pas Bon, then has his final confrontation -- wouldn't fill up a two-hour runtime? That's because it doesn't. Not even close.

I did a quick skim through the movie, noting the timestamps of when main plot-relevant scenes started and stopped. I tried to be generous: I included any scene relating to Gru Jr., Poppy or Maxime as "main plot-relevant," even when they were only providing characterization without actually moving the plot forward. In total, I found only 45 minutes of relevant scenes across a 95 minute movie. Not even half!

There's about 30 minutes of plot-relevant action sequences, divided roughly evenly between the initial battle at Lycée Pas Bon, the subsequent break-in, and the final sequence of fighting Übelschlecht and Maxime. There's another 15 minutes of scenes that develop the relationships between Gru, Gru Jr. and Poppy, or simply that give Maxime screen time to establish him better. But that's it. There are 50 minutes dedicated to subplots that go nowhere and have nothing to do with anything else.

I'm not saying every single scene has to drive the plot forward; there certainly should be some scenes dedicated to establishing the setting or simply giving the movie time to breathe. But those 50 minutes don't feel like they even manage that! They might as well be scenes from an unrelated movie, spliced in, simply to pad out of the runtime.

At least in The Super Mario Bros. Movie, basically every scene was about Mario. Imagine if that movie dedicated more time to Mario's family farting around Brooklyn than anything to do with the Mushroom Kingdom. Get your shit together, Illumination!!

For the sake of completeness, let's go over those subplots:

PART 2: THE OTHER 50% OF THE MOVIE

LUCKY THE GOAT

There's an "emotional" scene at the beginning of the movie where Agnes is tearfully separated from her pet goat Lucky. Which, why? If three Minions can come with the family, why not Lucky? The only answer seems to be "to create some cheap, unearned pathos." Agnes gets to be sad when they're separated. She gets to be worried once in the middle of the movie over the idea that Lucky will forget her. Then she gets to be joyful when it turns out he still remembers her after they're reunited, even though they've only been separated for 4 days.

Maybe Agnes and Lucky's relationship is super well-established in previous movies, making their separation poignant. I don't know. In this movie, all he does is shit on the floor before he's out of the script.

Agnes and Lucky's reunion is treated as the emotional climax of the movie, more worthy of screen time than Gru's son being de-cockroachitized. The goat wasn't even fucking in the movie he's treated like the big conclusion of!

LUCY THE HAIRDRESSER

Lucy, Gru's wife, is assigned to be a fancy hair stylist without any relevant experience or training. Her very first client is super demanding, resulting in Lucy immediately fucking everything up. Somehow, the hair dye she uses causes her client's hair to fall out and catch fire (how?), and in her haste to extinguish the flames, she splashes a tiny bit of water on a lightbulb, causing the entire store to short circuit and burn down.

She is later pursued by her irate client through a grocery store. And it's a funny scene, and I love that the scariest, most threatening character in the movie is a disgruntled suburban woman, complete with the iconic drum beat from The Terminator. DUN DUN DUN, DUN DUN!

Then, after the chase, the plot thread is dropped.

AGNES

Agnes feels uncomfortable lying about her real name and ends up being yelled at by her karate instructor, who Edith injures in retaliation.

End of subplot.

MARGO

Margo is bullied at her new school. Gru doesn't seem to care.

That's it. It's a one-sentence subplot. You'd think that'd be a bigger deal, but it's not.

THE BOUGIE NEIGHBORS

Gru's neighbors (Poppy's parents) are bougie assholes who Gru feels the need to win over out of spite, after being told by the AVL Director that he's bad at fitting in.

His neighbor clearly despises him, but Gru, seemingly oblivious, eventually pesters him into playing tennis together. They go to a country club to play tennis, but never actually play tennis because the Minions keep interrupting their tennis game. The tennis game gets called off when Gru gets the call about Übelschlecht harassing his kids, ending that subplot with no further closure. Tennis.

This idea that Gru would care so much about winning over his shallow asshole neighbors doesn't fit with what I know about him from the first movie. It seems antithetical to his nature, which is to stand out and be a massive nuisance with his giant rocket car. I have a hard time reconciling "actually gives a shit about conforming to society" and "wanted to steal the moon," but maybe his spite is just that powerful.

I bet Gru's need to try to charm these jerks made more sense in an earlier draft of a movie. I'll go into that more later.

THE MEGA MINIONS

Okay, here's the big one, the obvious setup for a Minions sequel. This is the C-plot as opposed to all those other D-plots.

Five of the Minions are given superpowers. We get a scene of them being comedically incompetent with their superpowers around the AVL Headquarters. This is followed by a scene where they attempt to fight crime with their superpowers, only to do more harm than good because of their comedic incompetence, causing them to be forcibly retired.

Once Gru's cover is blown, the Mega Minions are immediately unretired. (It's kinda weird that the director of the AVL has a single button on his desk, and it's for summoning a bunch of incompetent troublemakers that he forced into retirement.)

We get to see a scene for each individual Mega Minion, with each one having taken up a new hobby in the meantime. Then, after Maxime is knocked off the building and defeated, the Mega Minions end up trampling him before he can escape.

I do like that what the Mega Minions contribute in the end has nothing to do with their powers and everything to do with their hobbies: Maxime is glued to the ground by the melted cheese from a cheese wheel that one Minion brought, run over by the cattle being raised by another, stung by the bees from the Minion who took up beekeeping, etc. I feel like there was an idea there, where the Minions' interests turn out to be more important than the superpowers that were foisted upon them.

The movie doesn't actually do anything with that idea, but my god, I am trying to find good things about it. This is the best I can do.

MAXIME'S COCKROACH ARMY

When Maxime returns to his lair, it's revealed he has an army of devoted, adoring cockroaches ready to serve him. He then departs in his cockroach ship and they're never seen again.

It's things like this that make me think the script underwent heavy revision, leaving behind vestigal elements.

MAXIME'S GIRLFRIEND

Oh yeah, Maxime has a girlfriend! She doesn't do anything or express anything at any point in the movie. She looks bored. She mostly just seems like she doesn't want to be in the movie, and I don't blame her. I kept waiting for her to have some ulterior motive for helping Maxime, but... no. She's just there, like a prop.

The only thing she does in the movie is pursue Gru in the cockroach mecha for 32 seconds during the climatic battle, before unceremoniously dropping through the floor. I love that she isn't defeated by Gru's brains or wits; she just fucks up and removes herself from the movie. I love it when the heroes triumph by default!

THE GAS STATION

I included this as part of the "main plot" for my "45 out 95 minutes" calculation, but couldn't find a good way of working it into the plot recap. Between Poppy revealing to Gru that she knows his identity and them actually setting off for Lycée Pas Bon, we get a scene I liked okay: when Maxime's cockroach ship runs low on fuel, he lands at a gas station and tries to operate a pump, but can't get the machine to read his card.

When the attendant is no help, Maxime cockroachitizes him, then gloats about how "bad" it is for him to take a slushy without paying for it. Not because he turned someone into a cockroach mutant, not because he possibly stole 900 gallons of gasoline, but because of the stolen slushy. It's stupid, but it's a fun bit of characterization, so credit where credit is due.

MAXIME'S GRUDGE

Maxime's backstory also got included in my "main plot" calculation, even though it's not actually important and doesn't change anything. While Maxime flies around aimlessly, he explains the origin of his grudge against Gru (to his girlfriend, who would surely already know it): as teenagers, Gru and Maxime both entered the same talent show, only for Gru to perform Maxime's song first, causing Maxime to flee the show. Believing Gru to have done this on purpose to sabotage him, he's hated Gru ever since.

As the movie's final scene, Gru visits Maxime (now de-cockroachitized) in prison to confess that he indeed stole Maxime's song on purpose, but only did so as revenge for being pantsed at a dance. He accuses Maxime of fleeing the talent show not because Gru went on first, but because he knew Gru did a better job than he would. The two bicker over who's the better singer, resulting in them agreeing to a new talent show, which means it's time for...

THE OBLIGATORY
🎉 BIG STUPID 🎉
SONG AND DANCE
FINALE!!!!!!

Joy.

You know, I don't even hate Big Stupid Song and Dance Finales, but when they feel obligatory, ugh. I don't know, maybe it's hard for me to get behind Gru being chummy with the dude who kidnapped and cockroach'd his child five minutes ago.

Alright. D-plot recap complete. Time to talk about the movie properly:

PART 3: WHAT WAS THIS MOVIE EVEN ABOUT

The thing that gets to me is that it feels like there's a lot of threads in the movie that point towards a core theme: what Gru is passing down to the next generation. He has his adopted daughter Agnes, who he needs to pressure into lying to maintain their false identities. He has his biological son, Gru Jr., who spends the movie tormenting him, but has a change of heart when he remembers Gru being patient and loving towards him. And then there's Poppy, who forces Gru into a mentor role so that she can follow in his supervillain footsteps.

I kept thinking the movie would have something to say about any of these. Are we meant to contrast Agnes's naive innocence with Gru Jr.'s natural wickedness? There's a scene where he uses a safety pin (flicking it open like a switchblade) to pop balloons with perfect timing to terrorize Gru. He knows to play innocent whenever Gru is looking, so his malice is clearly meant to be intentional.

Are Gru Jr.'s actions meant to suggest a nascent supervillainy? The first time he listens to Gru is during the Lycée Pas Bon heist, and after their escape, the two seem to have bonded, suggesting the two can connect over villainy. Is his predilection for tormenting his father, his skill at navigating and disabling the security lasers, and his ability to instantly win over a rampaging honey badger supposed to suggest that he's a natural supervillain? How does Gru feel about that? Would Gru blame himself, seeing it as a failure of his blood?

And what about Poppy pursuing a life of supervillainy? Does he have any kind of feelings about helping someone go down a path that he ended up rejecting for himself? How does he feel about being forced to participate in a plot to kidnap someone's pet, even an evil person's? He knows how dearly his adopted daughter loves her pet; wouldn't he have some kind of feeling about kidnapping someone else's?

Does he ever feel tempted to indulge in supervillainy again? Does the delight of managing a heist on Lycée Pas Bon with improvised tools, culminating in a daring getaway, tempt him at all? Would he see it as his responsibility to steer Poppy away from that life? How does he feel knowing there are children who look up to him for the parts of his life that he now regrets?

But no, it just doesn't come up at all. Gru Jr. is just a naughty baby who loves to torment his father, ha ha funny, until his epiphany during the cockroach battle. Poppy gets to attend Lycée Pas Bon, and this is framed by the movie as an unambiguous happy ending for her.

(Also, how was Poppy's plan supposed to work? How was enraging the principal of the school you want to attend and keeping her mascot as a pet supposed to guarantee her attendance? I get the vibe -- impress the villainous principal by doing a villainy on her -- but it seems like rather than earn Übelschlecht's begrudging respect, all it did was enrage her. Übelschlecht was out for blood. She was willing to attack innocent children to get Lenny back!)

(I feel like it would've made more sense if Poppy was originally planning to return Lenny, rendering the heist impressive without actually depriving Übelschlecht of her pet, but it doesn't seem like returning Lenny was ever part of the plan. Poppy fled from Übelschlecht after being hunted down instead of offering Lenny to her. It seems like it was a bad plan right off the bat.)

Here's the thing: This movie makes a lot more sense when you realize that Poppy is actually the only character in it. Poppy is the only character with any meaningful agency. It is Poppy's movie.

Look at the overall pacing and structure: the opening scene establishes a deep rivalry between Gru and Maxime, but then Maxime is forced to spend literally 70% of the runtime aimlessly flying around, not being a threat. The main villain of the movie -- the one that the movie is supposed to be about -- is relegated to sitting on the sidelines until Poppy's actions bring him back into the plot.

Gru has no reason to attend the school reunion. He doesn't make the decision to move his family into hiding. He doesn't do anything interesting with his fake identity; there's no conflict there, no friction he experiences, no balance he has to strike, no real decisions he has to make. It's nothing he does that gives his identity away to Poppy. He's forced by Poppy into pulling the heist on his old school. And then it's Poppy who conveys him to his final showdown with Maxime. Gru's only motivation in the movie is to be a good father, but that has no influence on anything else. He never has to confront ways in which he falls short, or finds himself conflicted between being a good father and his other desires.

This is Poppy's movie. She's the only one whose desires drive the plot forward. Her desires are so critical to the plot that Gru, someone who has every possible reasons for objecting to her goal, can't even muster up anything more than a token resistance to helping her. And even then, it's nothing more than a tepid "I don't feel like it."

So what was this movie originally? I have a theory.

PART 4: MY THEORY

If you listen to the lyrics of the song that the movie opens with (Double Life, written for the movie by Pharrell Williams), what you hear describes a movie very different from the movie we actually got. The song focuses on the life of a man who has a double life: a risky, exciting secret life, and then a domestic life that he keeps it hidden from. The opening verse establishes this right away:

Hey, what are you hidin'?
What you doin' when you're gone?
Nothin' wrong bein' private
Make sure it ain't wrong
Your life, double-sided
Two-faced like coins
What side do I get?
Which side are you on?

...the second verse makes it even more explicit:

Lie detector time:
Do you feel bad when you lie?
The look on your face says the best life
And then come home like it's fine
Am I right?

...and the refrain sums it up:

Who will you be tonight?
That's the question.
Who will Gru be tonight?
That's the question.

Given just those lyrics, you might expect the movie to be about Gru trying to balance his secret agent life with the domestic life forced upon him by his false identity. And there's plenty of elements in the final movie that feel out of place, that would make more sense in that context!

1. The AVL director emphasizing the importance of Gru being "less Gru-ish." This would make sense if Gru being "Gru-ish" represented a threat to maintaining the fake identity that's keeping his family safe... but at this point in the movie, Gru has already been made by Poppy. And when his fake identity is eventually blown, it has nothing to do with how he acted around his neighbors or any other decision he made for himself. The emphasis given to Gru needing to be less "Gru-ish" would make sense in a movie where anything hinged on that.


2. Poppy's role in the movie. As it is, her dragging Gru back into the world of espionage and intrigue has no emotional stakes for him: the heist does not conflict with anything else going on his life, he does not find himself tempted to return to that world, and he doesn't have any opinion on what Poppy pursuing a path of supervillainy he rejected. She would make more sense in any other capacity: as someone representing the allure of danger to Gru, as the supervillain who works to expose him, anything.


3. Every single one of the suburbia plot threads. Gru's job. Lucy's job. Their relationship with their bougie neighbors. Agnes's discomfort with lying. Margo being bullied at school. All of these plot threads have no stakes and no closure. On the one hand, I can believe they were written just to fill runtime. But on the other, I can imagine a better movie, where Gru diverting time and attention away from his domestic life actually had consequences for his family. He could've had a reason for not being there to support his family instead of him just seemingly not caring. And his choice to continue indulging in the world of secret agents and supervillains could have been what eventually blew his family's cover. You know. Actual stakes and consequences. Character motivation and agency. Little things like that.


4. Gru Jr.'s role in the movie. When Gru first learns his family has to move into hiding, he sees a silver lining in getting to spend more time with Gru Jr. That ends up not amounting to anything: Gru Jr. seem to resent him despite Gru finally devoting more time to fatherhood. This is just a guess, but Gru Jr.'s resentment may have made more sense while Gru was actively hiding things from his son, or taking time away from his son in order to live his double life. I can imagine something touching where Gru realizes that trying to hide who he is from his son, to present the image of "the perfect father," ends up driving a wedge between them; then, when he learns to be open and honest, he and his son can finally bond properly. You know. Themes and meaning. Lessons and morals. Little stuff.


5. In addition to the opening song being about having to choose between a home life and a reckless life, there's also the visual element of Gru whipping his fancy car around hairpin turns while racing up the mountain at breakneck speeds. This is cool, but for an opening scene, it manages to not connect to anything else in the movie. Once Gru arrives at the school, the car is forgotten. It would make more sense if the movie explicitly contrasted Gru's fancy secret agent car in the opening scene with the reliable family sedan he drives once he's forced to adopt his false identity.


6. On that theme, Valentina having no role in the movie besides being a trophy girlfriend for Maxime makes me wonder if she wasn't meant to be contrasted against Lucy at some point. She feels like she's supposed to be a character like Mirage from The Incredibles, but she just doesn't have anything to do. She might have made more sense at a foil to Lucy.


7. This is a stretch, but Maxime's cockroach army must have had a bigger role in the original script. As it is, they're introduced and then dropped immediately. Maybe in the original script, Gru's identity is eventually blown when a cockroach follows him home after one of his secret outings? Maxime even brings a cockroach with him to Lycée Pas Bon during the opening scene in the movie; that same cockroach could've stowaway with Gru when he returned home after the heist, exposing him. I'm not sure about this, but I can't imagine the original draft didn't do something with Maxime's cockroach network instead of literally nothing.


8. As Agnes is watching Lucky be lead away, there's a shot where Gru looks like he's realizing something. It's a moment where Gru is forced to confront the consequences that his secret agent life has on his family. It's probably the most poignant shot in the movie, so it's easy to imagine it used to be an important character beat at one point.
   In the movie we got, however, this never comes up again. Gru experiences no further guilt over the difficulties his family faces as a consequence of his actions: he doesn't have to deal with his wife being fired and pursued by an enraged white woman, he doesn't do anything to resolve Agnes's guilt about needing to lie or being threatened by her karate teacher... he doesn't even seem upset when Margo reveals she's being bullied, instead immediately recentering himself and his issues in dealing with Gru Jr.
   After that one moment with Lucky, Gru's concern for his family's hardships is utterly absent, never mind any acknowledgement that he is responsible for them.

I can't be certain how much revision the movie's script went through, but when you look at just how many plot threads are weirdly divorced from any kind of relevance to the rest of the movie, it seems plausible to assume there were some major changes that stranded these elements. I have to imagine Pharrell Williams was hired to write Double Life before the script was finished, and by the time they realized the movie was no longer about any of the themes they asked him to write about, it was too late to have him change the song.

Why did the plot change so much? I have no idea. Maybe "man who is forced out of an exciting life but continues to pursue it even as it undermines his domestic life" hewed too closely to The Incredibles. Maybe more and more screentime was given over to The Mega Minions in order to set up the inevitable spinoff, requiring them to streamline the main plot out of existence. Maybe it's just another case of Writing By Committee, with changes being made without any one, coherent hand guiding it.

It really makes me wonder what the movie's script looked like originally. Despite it all, I can imagine this movie having real potential. Maybe it wouldn't have been an amazing movie, but it could have been solid. It could have been interesting.

But we didn't get that movie. Instead of a movie that has anything to say parenting and mentoring, or giving up on indulgences/glamour/acclaim to do right by your loved ones, or genetic destiny vs. self agency, or breaking cycles of evil, or finding an identity for yourself, the message instead seems to be...

"...it's good to be nice to your baby because it will help them break mind control."

That's it. That's it?

I guess that's it.

Be nice to your baby, everyone. It will help them break mind control.

PART 5: CONCLUSION

Were kids' movies always like this? I feel like I keep seeing kids' movies where the plot is painfully bad, a threadbare excuse to make sure the movie hits its setpieces. I don't feel like I have unrealistic standards! I don't care about the little contrivances and conveniences that are necessary to make a plot click together. I just need what the characters are doing on-screen to make sense, in more than just a "let my eyes glaze over and stare into the middle distance" way.

Obviously there were always bad kids' movies, but I feel like the extremely mainstream stuff tended to be competent, if not exceptional? As I write this, Despicable Me 4 is the 15th highest grossing movie of all time!!

Am I getting old? Am I getting to the point where I've forgotten all the terrible media I've consumed, leaving me with a false impression that new movies have problems that are uniquely awful?

Unrelatedly, should I be less upset that 48 of the top 50 top-grossing animated movies of all time are 3d-animated? Should I be upset that the only exception is The Simpson Movie at #50, and the original version of The Lion King, at #13... beaten out by the "live action" remake of The Lion King at #2?? NUMBER 2??

Am I just a cranky old man about all this??

I don't feel like my standards are even that high! I feel like I go out of my way to find meaning and themes in movies beyond what's reasonable, which leaves me flailing when I can't find anything to hook onto. I will always try to find the thing a movie does well, even when it's flimsy elsewhere.

I'm not picky! I really liked Inside Out 2! I think it has some fundamental problems (having the main characters all have a single primary emotion is extremely limiting; the plot hews extremely closely to Inside Out 1's; etc.), but I liked what it tried to say about identity, growing up and anxiety. It felt like it had an actual plot in there, with characters whose motivations and struggles made sense.

I don't know! I feel like this is a repeated Thing I keep seeing, where plot points don't actually line up in any kind of satisfying way. It's the Stuff Just Happens phenomenon. It was true of Make Your Mark, it was true of Illumination's Super Mario Bros. Movie, it was true of Everhood (I gotta finish that writeup), it was true of Descendents 4 (there's another potential writeup, come to think of it), and it's true here.

Maybe I'm just getting old, I say, typing this up in Notepad. Oh well.

Here's hoping Sonic the Hedgehog 3 is good.

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As always, thanks for reading! I hope you enjoyed this more than I enjoyed the movie.