What? Did you give birth again?
Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) is certainly no match for the eponymous flagship of the Despicable Me franchise, of which this is the fifth installment but second prequel, set when lead Gru is hardly a teenager, but compared to the previous addition, Minions (2015), it’s a marginal improvement.
When you, or kid Gru in this case, wants to be a super-villain, what’s your logical course of action? That’s right: find an old, washed up arch-villain who needs a bit of a buck-up, and then brown nose like mad. Wild Knuckles fills the bill, as his gang betrayed him on their last gig. Gru originally applies to replace his idol, but during the interview he gets dissed for being all of 12 years old.
And what should a villain do? Show his chops by stealing from the gang itself. The target, though, happens to be the gang’s most valuable holding, so when it disappears, youthful Gru finds disengaging from the finest gang of super-villains around is more of a chore than he expected.
But here’s a key part of the review: I wrote the above a month ago, forgot about it, and now I can’t remember the rest of the movie. I know it involves a great deal of classic pop and rock music. There’s a cursed Chinese magical charm that converts the members of the gang into their feral inner selves.
And, rather than being heart-warming and that sort of thing, it’s just sort of silly. It’s not memorable, not even close.
Which is too bad, but that’s the way of it. Don’t go looking for this to be as good as the first two installments, because the key to the first installment was Gru’s conversion from arch-villain to, reluctantly, adoptive father and general good guy. The process of that conversion helps the audience see how good people and bad people act, and the consequences thereof. The second installment, Despicable Me 2 (2013), continues that exploration and, perhaps accidentally, demonstrates that tools lack moral agency or moral attributes, it’s the intention that matters.
And so do jelly guns.
But, setting aside the boring third installment, these last two lack the moral dimension of the first two installments. Sure, there’s lots of badness, as it were, but Gru doesn’t grow morally, he merely outsmarts some other bad guys. Lessons are presented, but he seems impervious, and perhaps rightly so.
Because the rewards of outsmarting the gang aren’t damaged or disappointing. Add in the fact that he yearns to excel at being bad, rather than having a justification for his bad behavior, and the entire structure just collapses into a dull, dusty heap.
