Despicable Me 4 should really be called Minions 6. That's not technically a value judgment; it would be simply a more honest label, one that describes the shifting priorities of the animated franchise and the studio responsible for it. (Illumination, which also produced The Super Mario Bros. Movie and The Secret Life of Pets, has made its branding increasingly Minion-centric over the years.) It would also more accurately reflect a film so nonsensically scattered that its jabbering banana-slug mascots are the only characters who make any kind of sense.
With his villain days behind him – though not his villainous methods or disposition – reformed criminal mastermind Gru (Steve Carell) has taken a job with the Anti-Villain League, or the AVL, who enlist his services to thwart colorful evildoers seeking to rule (or alternately destroy) the world. Gru is now firmly a family man: He’s been married to the sunny Lucy Wilde (Kristen Wiig) since Despicable Me 2, and the couple now has a biological son. They’re also still raising three daughters – Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier), and Agnes (Madison Polan) – none of whom have gotten any older since Gru adopted them in the first movie.
This Simpsons-esque approach to aging isn't a problem, but it's one key indicator of who these movies are made for: the latest crop of little kids, with no real effort to welcome repeat viewers back once they've outgrown its garish colors and slapstick hijinks. The omnipresent Minions are another. They’re no closer to having individual personalities than they were 14 years ago, despite an effort to spotlight Kevin (the tall one), Stuart (the one with the comb over), and Bob (the bald one) in the two Minions spin-offs. The three Minions accompanying Gru and his family here are named Ralph, Ron, and Gus, with just enough variation in their builds to tell them apart, though they all coalesce into a formless mass eventually.
But this is the Minions’ purpose at this point in the series: to be interchangeable cylindrical clowns who spew gibberish dotted with occasional Spanish – or, in the case of Despicable Me 4, Italian. (Sorry, parents: Your kid's new favorite word is about to be "pomodoro.") As annoying as the little twerps can be, they're also the best part of Despicable Me 4 – or the only part that kind of works. Gru's plot involves attending a reunion at his alma mater in order to apprehend a cockroach-themed villain, the wretchedly French Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell, whose accent is only slightly more placeable than Carell's). After Maxime escapes and vows revenge, Gru and his family are forced into hiding, and have to assume new identities in a wealthy neighborhood.
What follows is a series of non sequiturs, during which each character interacts with a neighbor or teacher who's never seen again and has no impact on the larger story of Maxime's revenge. However, his payback has to wait for most of the runtime, allowing the family’s disconnected vignettes to play out in full. One of the kids goes to school, two others take karate lessons, Gru plays a game of tennis with a neighbor voiced by Stephen Colbert – but none of this amounts to anything. It’s arguable that the target audience for Despicable Me 4 is younger than it was for its predecessors, given the low-attention-span way it zips between random topics. All the while, the actual jokes are aimed at adults who might be able to recognize something familiar in them – the price of gas sure has shot up in recent years! – but none of the humor stems from the characters themselves.
Parallel to all the Gru shenanigans, the AVL grants five Minions a set of Marvel-esque superpowers before unleashing them to patrol the streets. One resembles the X-Men's Cyclops, two are molded off the Fantastic Four's Ben Grimm and Reed Richards, another is like the Hulk, and the last one flies. None of this ends up relevant to the Maxime story either (the villain largely bides his time while other pieces fall into place), but it's hard not to wonder if a Minion superhero parody was the movie that Illumination or returning series director Chris Renaud truly wanted to make. It's one of only two segments of Despicable Me 4 where the gags feel interconnected and the animation feels at all dynamic or inspired. (The other is a sadly short-lived heist sequence involving a weaponized wheelchair.)
Otherwise, the movie tends to have an uncanny look about it that surely can't be pleasant for younger viewers – or anyone, for that matter. Cockroaches are a frequent presence, and the characters' features – their eyebrows, their skin textures – are a tad more realistic than in previous Despicable Mes (an impression enhanced by real-world camera tricks like soft focus). These are cartoon characters, and pushing them towards naturalistic appearances places them firmly in a gross uncanny valley.
For better or worse, the Minions are at least consistently oafish and antic across the entirety of Despicable Me 4, whether as the focus of their own Avengers-style plot, or in the background of other people's inconsequential stories. They may have long outstayed their welcome outside the franchise, but they're simple enough that it's hard to screw them up, even in a movie where pretty much nothing else works.
