'Despicable Me' review

"Despicable Me" (Credit: Illumination Entertainment/Universal)

Plump, clumsy, big-nosed, bonehead villain Gru (Steve Carell) operates in the shadow of his arch nemesis, Vector (Jason Segel), who just stole one of Egypt’s pyramids with a shrink-ray gun, leaving the world fawning over the dastardly feat. Meanwhile Gru can’t even get on the police scanner, so he concocts a high-profile scheme to steal the moon. But in order to find funding for his plot, Gru needs to steal Vector’s shrink gun first. His only hope: Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Agnes (Elsie Fisher) and Edith (Dana Gaier), three orphaned girl scouts who, thanks to their foolproof coconut cookies, seem to be the only ones who can cross Vector’s shark-infested moat.

The buzz: Voice work in big screen animation has become an easy Hollywood paycheck. From Ray Romano’s plodding “Ice Age” delivery to Jerry Seinfeld in “Bee Movie,” there often isn’t much “performance” to it at all. Just read off the page, and cash the checks. “Despicable Me” demands its stars stretch beyond the norm. Carell dives deep into Gru’s hefty Hungarian accent, while Russell Brand is a riotous mad scientist, Segel makes a manic Vector, and Julie Andrews chews the fat as Gru’s sarcastic mommy. The visuals come from computers, but the actors use all their oratory ingenuity to mold solid, affecting performances.

The verdict: It takes some serious guts to set out to be a Pixar imitator, but that gamble pays off if you have the necessary skills. “Despicable Me” aims to do for villains what Pixar’s “The Incredibles” did for superheroes: Provide realistic neuroses that turn clichéd one-dimensional figures into complex, captivating screen personalities. Here, that means giving us a bad guy we want to root for. The first half of the story builds up Gru’s humorous absurdity (he doesn’t live on some remote island hideaway, but right in the suburbs, driving a clunky, archaic self-designed car that he has trouble parallel parking), before the second half cashes in on the heart lurking within this ogre—suggesting that Plan B is sometimes better than Plan A and maybe grabbing the moon is not nearly as rewarding as finding someone to care about. Voiced lovingly, scored to a distinctive hip hop soundtrack, always able to find unique payoffs for its various subplots (girl scout cookie robots, aerial shrink ray dogfights), “Despicable Me” is at once a derivative extension of Pixar’s themes and a replica so polished and creative that it’s hard to resist.

Did you know? While Twentieth Century Fox, DreamWorks and Disney/Pixar have already asserted their dominance in animation, Universal has been slow to catch up. Choosing an original story as odd as “Despicable Me” as a summer release is a gutsy way to break in, and seeing how they’ve delivered laughs, artistry and heart, we welcome the competition.

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