![]() ![]() But none of it is the sort of all-encompassing misanthropy that made Gru so hilarious an anti-hero in the first film. Who else incurs Gru’s wrath? How about the boy Gru’s eldest daughter, Margo (the voice of Miranda Cosgrove: School of Rock), thinks is cute? That’s just completely appropriate Dad behavior, of course: it’s a father’s duty to ensure that no male of the species ever gets close to his daughter. One particularly awful scene apparently demanded, for comedy’s sake, that an unpleasant evening end with Gru drugging his date and hauling her home atop a car as if she were, perhaps, a deer slain on a hunt. Where Me ended with a happy, unconventional family, Me 2 is all about finding Gru (the voice of Steve Carell: The Incredible Burt Wonderstone, Hope Springs) a wife, so that the family can be “normal.” Somehow this “naturally” translates into a “comedic” running motif about how women are too fat, too ugly, too hairy, too obnoxious, too pushy, too anything-but-“ladylike” for Gru. It’s an almost terrifying reversal we get instead. I’m sure I unconsciously imagined that the same team behind Me would have found a way around this narrative dilemma, so it makes Me 2 even more of a crushing disappointment that they didn’t. The appealing premise of the first film - Gru’s humorous despicableness - cannot carry over, because the first film was all about the little girls curing Gru of his villainy, which they did entirely too well. Because they have reverted to tedious, narrowminded Hollywood form with Me 2. Obviously their cunning creativity was a fluke, too. They get that we need new stories and new perspectives, and they get that it’s possible to offer such scary things and still be entertaining.īut I was wrong. Screenwriters Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (who as a team wrote Hop and Horton Hears a Who!). Directors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud ( The Lorax). I thought, at the time: These guys get it. ![]() By some fluke, Despicable Me earned more than $250 million in North America (and even more than that internationally). And, of course, the simple fact that the first film was not based on a comic book or a line of toys or another older movie was almost earth-shattering. Filling out a cast of characters with three wild - and wildly individual - little girls bursting with personality is another way. Casting a villain as the hero is one way… even if the only way to get away with that is in a cartoon comedy. But it doesn’t take much to shake up a Hollywood paradigm. What makes Despicable Me 2 so enraging is that the first film did challenge us. And it took a huge 65 percent drop in North America over its second weekend, and a smaller but still dramatic 56 percent in the U.K., because it’s not a same-old-Supes story, and apparently that earned it bad word-of-mouth.) It opened well, because everyone knows and loves Superman. Because comfortable familiarity is better than challenging freshness. Monsters U made an obscene amount of money last weekend and will play strong throughout the summer. There is, quite literally, no need to find any new stories to tell or - at a bare minimum - any clever way to tell old stories because mass audiences don’t seem to care. Little packages of Hollywood’s creative bankruptcy wrapped up in CGI glitter. ![]() Now, mere days later, it’s Despicable Me 2. Apparently this is to be the summer of Animated Movies That Did Not Require A Sequel But Are Getting One Anyway. (what is this about? see my critic’s minifesto) I’m “biast” (pro): adored the first movie ![]()
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