Sequels. Sequels as far as the eye can see. This particular one is Despicable Me 2 which has just been comically launched onto Blu-ray and DVD when you weren't looking, available in all good CeX stores. As I type palm fistedly into my phone, a spark infested car trailing it's exhaust and flat tire has just gone past and looks like it may explode. It didn’t. But if it had that would have been roughly how exciting this film was. In a kid's film kinda way.
Since last time Gru, an animated and more eloquent version of Wallace Shawn, and his trinity of adopted daughters have retired to a life of creating jam. Gone are the days of evil plans and they’ve been living happily and relatively peacefully for a while now. He's a family man and has come to his sense and now just wants to look after his girls.
Of course being that it is a film about something instead of absolutely nothing, in walks a member of some soft of superhero collective a bit like The Avengers mixed with The Vogons – a very bureaucratic version of the JLA. There is also significant sub-plot revolving around Gru trying to get a date with a woman (against his will of course), and Lucy Wilde, voiced by Kristen Wiig, is definitely going to be the woman ends up with. I mean it's almost like this film was written for children! HA!
So Gru has been asked to help save the world because there is a bad man doing bad things with some bad purple potion somewhere out there. Possibly one of the strangest things to see in a children’s cartoon after two bottles of wine, is a scene where under the guise of having a sensor in his pocket Gru thrusts quite sexually at all things in a room. Also I'm fairly sure a minion was caught giving a rim-job to a stuffed unicorn at one point.
Some Christian websites have even warned families of this film because of the sexual content. The lists of “adult themed” content includes:
- One scene in which a very persistent women flirts with Gru.
- Several scenes in which Gru’s daughters encourage him to go out on dates.
- A scene where a woman mistakenly thinks a man slapped her on her bottom. She slaps him across the face.
- Gru’s daughter Margo flirting with a boy, saying, ‘He’s so cool’.
- Margo using her phone to send a text message to a boy. A worried-looking Gru asks his other daughters if Margo is texting a girl or a boy.
You can see how saying someone is ‘so cool’ could lead to the corruption of today's youth, I can't imagine how terrified this woman would be reading one of my reviews or listening to Steel Panther.
Anyway. Someone has stolen an entire lab that can turn nice cute things into big horrible things and Gru suspects it’s a big Mexican guy who is so manly he didn’t die when he exploded in a volcano. The kind of guy that could drink Ireland under the table, impregnates men and women just by having been in the same room as them at some point, and can bench press New Zealand before eating a cattle ranch for his breakfast.
Everyone else in the superhero collective think it was some other guy and sacks Gru and sends Lucy away. But in the classic movie way everything gets sorted out and it turns out Gru was right about the Mexican. No Bueno. So he saves Lucy and everyone gets married and somewhere in there Margo gets her heart broken for the first time by El Mutherfucko’s equally sleazy little bastard son. I’m quite fond of Margo and I kinda wish I could’ve kicked El Minipeeno in the head, but I can’t and I must live with that.
It’s fair to say that these films would be okay at best if it wasn’t for the minions, and I have found myself laughing at them quite childishly. Really basic slapstick wonderfully paced can really send me over the edge some times. Which makes me feel like a simpleton, so I can’t really enjoy the laughs. Which is sad.
Watch it though, it’s great.
Dave Roberts
Despicable Me 2 at CeX
