Despicable Me 4 review: Good Enough is the enemy of Good

It’s hard not to approach reviewing Despicable Me 4 with anything other than a sense of futility. Illumination Studios seems to have cracked the code for mainstream blockbuster success, not by being any good, but by being merely “Good Enough.” Good Enough distracts even the shortest attention spans. Good Enough keeps parents from feeling alienated by their kids’ tastes. Good Enough is a yellow Minions bucket hat that makes you feel in on the fun while the theater reacts to cartoon slapstick with deathly silence. Good Enough is a few bland chuckles uttered in a vacuous 90 minutes you struggle to remember even as the credits start to roll. Good Enough is a black hole, of which Despicable Me 4 is the singularity.

I, for one, am really, really sick of Good Enough.

The plot of Despicable Me 4, such as it is, finds Gru (Steve Carell) and family going into hiding from the villainous Maxime (Will Ferrell), whose claim to evil seems to simply be that he loves cockroaches so much that he wants to be one. (No shame, dude. You do you.) The majority of screentime is devoted to the family’s attempts to blend in with their WASPish new neighborhood, neither developing further as characters nor pushing the plot forward in any appreciable way. Gru attempts to befriend his new neighbor Perry (Stephen Colbert) over a game of tennis. Lucy (Kristen Wiig) immediately blows her cover as a hair stylist, later prompting a chase through a supermarket. Margo (Miranda Cosgrove) gets bullied at school off-screen. Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Skyy Polan) take a karate lesson with a jerk instructor (Brad Ableson). These situations, while theoretically funny, lack both the punch of comedic timing or actual written jokes, so the result is the biggest possible sin for a comedy: it’s boring.

A story almost threatens to emerge when their new teenage neighbor Poppy (Joey King) threatens to expose Gru’s identity unless he assists her on a heist. So then they do the heist. And that’s basically a wrap on Poppy. No tension or stakes can get in the way of these non-threatening family-friendly vibes! This sub-arc does ostensibly set up the film’s climax, but with all the elegance of a bullet point scrawled on a whiteboard. There’s nothing substantial to hold on to as the film flits between frantically staged scenes that use the setting of suburbia but never go so far as to satirize it–wouldn’t want to alienate a key demographic!–which is indicative of a film so concerned with aggressive hyperactivity that it can’t pause long enough to let the seed of a narrative take root. The closest Despicable Me 4 has to a character arc is the mute infant Gru Jr. realizing that he does, in fact, love his father, which isn’t so much a culmination of their adventures as an unearned heel turn when the movie realizes it needs to wrap things up.

You may be wondering where the Minions (voiced by Pierre Coffin) are in all of this, and the answer is “just over there,” doing a whole lot of nothing much. The film’s marketing has leaned heavily on the new superpowered Mega-Minions, obvious parodies of Marvel superheroes that shake up the bland anonymity of the standard Minion design. However, these characters don’t have much to do with the main story at all, sequestered to a few sequences that deliver the exact same kinds of rubbery cartoon gags we’re already used to from the Minions, begging the question of what the point even is. Obviously the point is easy parodic marketability, but it’s really glaring how blatantly the Minions are shoehorned into a movie that otherwise tries to minimize their presence in the main plot.

And yet, despite all these frustrations, Despicable Me 4 is rather expensively rendered and animated, which lends it a sense of legitimacy palatable enough to make it go down relatively smooth. There’s nothing intrinsically offensive about a film with low stakes, minimal plotting, or even comedy for the blandest sensibilities. But when a film is all of those things, one has to wonder what we’re even doing here. Does Illumination simply make films for repeated streaming consumption, to be played in the background, only to be paused and picked up again on a whim without concern for how any of the pieces fit together? If so, how is this the theatrical event for the whole family? Don’t children and their parents deserve better? Don’t we deserve to get pulled into a story or, heaven forbid, be served a gag worth laughing at?

No, this is Good Enough.