Despicable Me 4
It's sobering to realize that we are now almost 30 years into the age of CGI-animated feature films, long enough for some CGI franchises to have graduated from ‘long-running’ to ‘venerable’. In the decades since Pixar set the ball rolling with the ground-breaking Toy Story in 1995, every major studio has jumped on the digital bandwagon as a cost-effective way of churning out colorful, family-friendly content to keep the kids occupied when school's out. While never coming close to Pixar's Academy-Award-winning technical and storytelling innovation, their digital imitators have frequently stolen the crown for both longevity and profitability.
Of the myriad pretenders, Universal's Despicable Me franchise, now on its sixth installment (including spin-offs) holds the record for sheer bankability. The latest offering, Despicable Me 4, pushes no envelopes and breaks absolutely no new ground, but like all profitable products, it does exactly what it says on the tin and does it competently.
This latest episode finds supervillain-turned-suburban-dad Gru (voiced again by Steve Carell) attending a high school reunion in France where he bumps into erstwhile class-mate Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell), who has never forgiven Gru for pilfering his school talent show act (a cringe-inducing karaoke rendition of Culture Club's “Karma Chameleon”). Maxime has modified his body with cockroach DNA to transform himself into Cockroach Man in a suitably-insane attempt to conquer the world, and hatches a dastardly plot (along with his villainous girlfriend Valentina, voiced by Sofia Vergara) to take his revenge on Gru by kidnapping his baby son.
The Anti-Villain League takes Gru's family into a witness protection program to hide them from Maxime, where their new identities prove somewhat problematic. Gru's wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) takes on a brief and catastrophic career as hairdresser Blanche, while Gru's cover as solar panel salesman Chet, is quickly blown by one of their neighbors, a lisping teenager Poppy, who has villainous aspirations of her own. Meanwhile, most of the real stars of the franchise — Gru's yellow horde of slapstick, prat-falling Minions — have been taken in by the Anti-Villain League, which selects five of them to undergo experimental superhero transformations into MegaMinions (in an amusing riff on Marvel's Avengers and Fantastic Four).
As you might expect from this potted synopsis, there isn't much of any real substance here. Such a plot, as there is, would be better described as a ramshackle collection of hastily-scribbled sub-plots lashed together with slapstick and visual effects. That said, what the film lacks in depth it makes up for in enthusiasm; there are laughs aplenty to be found in the plethora of comedy-action set-pieces, one particularly memorable example being a hilarious homage to James Cameron's Terminator 2. The voice acting is, like the rest of the movie, solidly workmanlike if not exactly memorable, and overall, director Chris Renaud succeeds in his mission to provide 90 minutes of colorful family fluff. One can't help wondering, however, if this is the point where Despicable Me hits the law of diminishing returns; how much gas is left in the tank for this franchise? We'll find out when the planned eighth installment, Minions 3, arrives sometime in 2027.
Deadpool & Wolverine
As anyone who's set foot inside a cinema in the last 20 years can tell you, superhero movies now rule the world. Every year sees another crop of CGI-laden box-office juggernauts pumped out by the sausage factories of D.C. and Marvel, although some recent offerings have bombed in spectacular fashion. This suggests, perhaps, that audiences are beginning to tire of the endless rinse-and-repeat superhero formula: some stupidly good-looking people in spandex band together to stop an evil megalomaniac from destroying the world. Again.
In 2016, to alleviate the indigestion brought on by an endless diet of deadly-serious world-saving melodrama, Marvel gleefully administered a refreshing, if shocking, purgative in the form of the R-rated, F-bomb-dropping, fourth-wall-breaking Deadpool, which raised an unashamed middle finger at the earnest seriousness of the X-Men franchise that spawned it and forever destroyed the myth that all superhero movies must be family-friendly.
Today, Marvel's flagship blockbuster for summer 2024 is a third helping of Deadpool's snarky, wisecracking franchise mockery in the form of Deadpool & Wolverine. The very existence of which is evidence of its unapologetic irreverence, considering that Hugh Jackman's Wolverine was definitively killed off in James Mangold's elegiac Logan. The real-world ‘bromance’ between Jackman and Deadpool's alter-ego Ryan Reynolds has, however, coaxed the former out of retirement for one last cigar-chomping adventure as the sour-tempered, alcoholic loner with the adamantium skeleton.
The tone for the movie is emphatically established in the opening scene, in which a wisecracking Deadpool variously dismembers, impales or decapitates an entire cohort of soldiers with the skeletal remains of Wolverine's exhumed corpse. Yes, it's in exceptionally poor taste, but then the whole point of Deadpool is that poor taste is his superpower. The McGuffin which enables Deadpool and Wolverine to team up involves Marvel's new ‘multiverse’: This incarnation of Deadpool inhabits a universe as plain old Wade Wilson, used car salesman, until he is plucked unceremoniously out of his timeline by rogue Time Variance Authority (see Loki) operative Mr. Paradox (Matthew Mcfadyen). Paradox informs Deadpool that his universe is dying, and offers him the opportunity to join the ‘Sacred Timeline’ as an Avenger. Deadpool is tempted, but instead steals Paradox's space-time portal device and embarks on a reality-hopping quest to locate a living Wolverine variant to help him save his doomed universe.
What follows is a potty-mouthed, ultra-violent, slightly homoerotic superhero remake of The Odd Couple, with huge side-helpings of ‘meta’ in-jokes for veteran followers of the Marvel content factory (anyone who hasn't been following the corporate politics of Disney's acquisition and merger of the X-Men franchise will be intimately familiar with it after the credits roll). Cameos from the stars of past Marvel installments abound, while some very famous faces return as unexpected characters, and the film closes with a nostalgic montage of Hugh Jackman's quarter-century as Wolverine.Packed with tasteless, gory, but laugh-out-loud funny action sequences, Deadpool & Wolverine is a comedic feast for long-time Marvel fans. Who can now legitimately claim that the following fact is canon: Deadpool is now a Disney princess.
Recently arrived in the Tri-Cities from Scotland, Damian Beagan is a former freelancer who has written music and movie reviews for UK websites.
