Wednesday, January 15, 2025

DESPICABLE ME 3 (2017)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *comedy*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *psychological*                                                                                                                                               While I thought DESPICABLE ME 2 was funny, the decision to make Felonious Gru a full-time family man and an agent of the Anti-Villain League didn't play to the strengths of the original character. Possibly the writers of #3 sensed that on some level, since the film begins with Gru (Steve Carell) and his new wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) acting as agents for the AVL and getting fired when they fail to capture the latest new super-villain, former child actor Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker). Unfortunately, after the former super-villain and his wife get fired, the whole story becomes mostly about their trying to redeem themselves with the ungrateful agency and become super-villain fighters once more. I think this was short-sightedness on the part of the writers, since Gru and Lucy could just as easily gone into private consultation on the prevention of super-villainy or something.                                                                                               

  The writers, though, weren't terribly interested in originality, since for #3 they resurrected one of the moldiest of moldy-oldie plotlines: the guy who finds out he's got a secret twin brother he's never known about: a twin who's opposed to the original in some way. In Gru's case, he learns that when his parents split, the father (who I guess is deceased in the story) took with him a twin named Dru, while the mother kept Gru. Gru became a famous super-villain in reaction to his mother's negligence, but Dru's father wanted Dru to become a villain. Unfortunately for the dad, Dru was a light-hearted schmuck with no talent for villainy. When circumstances bring about the reunion of Gru and Dru, what Dru wants most is for his twin to school him in the art of the skillful super-heist artist. Gru obliges, but only as a means of catching up with Balthazar and nailing him so that Gru and Lucy can get their jobs back.                                             
The interactions of Gru and Dru are pretty hokey, but the notion behind Balthazar Bratt is leaden to the point of distraction. The concept is that as a child he had a successful TV show about a naughty kid super-villain. When the show was cancelled, Bratt decided to become a real malefactor, complete with all sorts of kid-themed super-weapons. I suppose the kid-audience #3 was aimed at might have enjoyed the spectacle of a forty-something man sprinting around like a juvenile, but none of that alleged humor worked for me. There's a subplot about Lucy trying to learn how to be a mother to Gru's three adoptees, but that too proved forgettable.  


 

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