Despicable Me is set in a Looney Tunes cartoon world, where dastardly villains have to apply to the bank of evil for funding and people can have missiles shot in their faces, emerging only with a reddened face and little birds flying around their heads. We follow the trials of the super villain Gru, as he tries to prove himself the most dastardly of all the villains by defeating the young upstart Vector. After Vector steals the Pyramids of Giza, Gru decides that the only way to prove to the world he is the baddest of all the bad is to steal... The Moon.
So then we are set for silliness on overdrive. Gru has all sorts of evil tricks and tools for stealing anything and everything, Vector has all sorts of ingenious ways of keeping Gru out of his evil lair. All the while Gru is fending off the loving attentions of a trio of orphan girls he is trying to use to get inside Vector's lair. Will they tug at Gru's heartstrings and get him to find his soul? Does Gru's soul really lie in his thievery? Does any of this matter - isn't the point to watch the Minions and chuckle at their silliness?
The main issue here is that I just don't find this sort of slapstick Looney Tunes cartoonery funny any more - and if where I do find it funny it is hard to find it funny for 100 minutes. Yes the Minions are silly. And yes they are funny with their silliness and funny speech and squishy indestructibility. But that can't be all this film has going for it. I guess maybe I'm just not quite the audience Despicable Me was aiming for. It makes perfect sense that a sequel was made, and that there was a subsequent film focusing entirely on the Minions. Universal Studios have stumbled on to something that has touched the current zeitgeist with these babbling yellow creations. Good luck to them and their marketing strategies to milk as much profit as possible out of them, I shan't be handing them any more of my cash.
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