‘DESPICABLE ME 4’ REVIEW: GRU UNDERCOVER

After three “Despicable Me” films and two “Minions” spinoffs, Gru and co. are the stars of the highest-grossing animated-film franchise of all time. The formula is gold: Physical comedy for toddlers, much of it built around the chaos of the jabbering little capsule-men the Minions, accompanies a more sophisticated strain that spoofs James Bond thrillers and Gen-X and Millennial culture. There’s also a French element that adds panache: Gru’s alma mater is an anti-Hogwarts for baddies in training that’s called the “Lycée Pas Bon.”

Gru (voiced by Steve Carell), the ex-villain who is now a secret agent with the Anti-Villain League, is living contentedly with his wife, Lucy (Kristen Wiig), and their four children, now including a baby, Gru Jr., when a school reunion revives a long-dormant dispute with a high-school classmate, Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell). Maxime has an unhealthy affection for cockroaches, and turns himself into one. He winds up in prison, but what bug can be contained by a cell? Along with his girlfriend, Valentina (Sofía Vergara), he plots his revenge.

Which doesn’t arrive until the end of a movie that is otherwise a series of digressions within digressions. The heart of the Gru-niverse is slapstick and capers, but the balance is all off here. A disappointing script by Mike White (“School of Rock,” “The White Lotus”) and Ken Daurio, who co-wrote the first three entries, goes all-in on lame physical comedy. In hiding from their foe, Gru, Lucy and the little ones (kids, Minions) enter what amounts to a witness-protection program that means taking on fake identities in an upscale community. This generates misunderstandings with their neighbors that are boringly low-stakes when compared with the series’ usual world-altering plots, and the director, Chris Renaud, massively overestimates the comic value of getting the Minions (voiced by Pierre Coffin) stuck in a vending machine for a fourth or fifth time. Lucy, whose fake identity is hairdresser, runs afoul of a customer at a beauty salon, then gets into high jinks avoiding her in a grocery store. Meanwhile, some of the Minions report to the Anti-Villain League’s secret-gadget lab and get injected with superpower serum that turns them into a parody of the Fantastic Four. Cue super-ineptitude, both on screen and in the writing.

It isn’t until the second half that we get to one of the series’ trademark heists, in this case a plot to steal the honey-badger mascot from Gru’s alma mater. Poppy (Joey King), a supercilious teen neighbor whose look seems derived from 1990s Chelsea Clinton, learns Gru’s true identity and blackmails him into taking her on the excursion, and given that he accidentally brought Baby Gru’s diaper bag instead of his high-tech equipment, he is forced to improvise with items such as bottles and baby powder. This scene is the only one in the movie that contains the whimsical imagination and comic energy that had been mainstays of the first three entries.

Aside from that interlude of genial lunacy, which gives us a demented principal done up to look like Gary Oldman’s Dracula, “DM 4” is by far the weakest of the Gru movies, right down there with 2015’s “Minions” as the worst in the six-film universe. Even with his phlegmy Russian accent, Mr. Carell can’t make the line “Like a nice meatloaf, I’m pretty delicious” funny, and despite the gift of a French accent, the normally reliable Mr. Ferrell can’t do anything with Maxime, either. He’s a generic psycho sputtering such fulminations as “I will exterminate you!” The series used to spoof such dumb genre conventions but the latest edition mostly doesn’t even try to be clever, contenting itself with stumblebum antics like having someone slip in the butter at a grocery store or showing a Minion pelting Gru’s snooty neighbor with a tennis-ball launcher. When Maxime suggests a supervillain name for himself, the best he can do is “Cockroach Man,” which he acknowledges is “a little on the nose.”

Any comedy writer who finds himself typing those self-negating words should experience a pang of conscience as he reaches for the delete key, and Mr. White’s normally keen sense of character is also nowhere in evidence. Nearly every scene is aimed at little kids and adults who are stuck with early-grade-school taste. Despicable? More like Gru-some.

2024-07-03T21:21:04Z dg43tfdfdgfd