LogFAQs > #961793764

40. Despicable Me 3

Karo: 31
Red: 31
Inviso: 32
Evillord: 35
Johnbobb: 39
Ermine: 40

Total: 208

Karo: After being fired from being a secret agent for arbitrary reasons, Gru finds out he has a long lost twin brother living in the fictional country of Freedonia, where the people are a sort of a gypsy-mediterranean kind of culture whose portrayal is honestly pretty racist. I guess I shouldnt really be surprised, given the thinly veiled insensitivity present throughout the franchise in the form of the pseudo-foreign Minions.
Gru's brother is named Dru, because someone thought it would be cute for the siblings to have similar sounding names. But, our protagonists full name is Felonious Gru, as in Gru is his last name. So now we literally have a character named Dru Gru. Good job, guys.
Anyway this brother is an aspiring yet incompetent villain who wants Gru's help in being bad, and Gru spends most of the movie with this idiot acting like a severely balding manchild and generally just ignoring the family he apparently loved so much in the other movies.
So the girls' antics are cute. The Minions' antics are annoying. There's a silly over the top antagonist. Havent we done this all before?
I don't care about Gru's love life, I don't care about his weird relatives, I cane about his relationship with the wonderful little girls that melted his cold heart and set him on the path to become a less-than-despicable person. Y'know, the thing that made the first film a joy to watch and set it firmly in stone as the best movie Illumination ever made. Really, if there ever was a movie that didn't need spinoffs it was Despicable Me. So you can be absolutely sure we are going to get fucking five of them. Thanks, Hollywood.

Red: Do you want lots of Gru, Gru 2, and minions? No? Well too bad because now you are getting two movies in one as we're out of ideas of what to do with the minions and they are relegated entirely to a side story from the main plot. A main plot which I will note leaves this franchise nowhere except having Gru with an out of nowhere sibling and everything else as completely status quo where you assumed the second movie left everything. For a franchise with a lot of wiggle room for world creativity this is a sequel that really feels creatively bankrupt.

Inviso: This is not the first movie on this list (nor do I think it will be the last), where I dont think its a good movie, but by virtue of it being SLIGHTLY interesting, and at least able to maintain its pacing throughout the runtime, I have to rank it perhaps overly high. Its still not great though. I dont want to make a direct connection to Ice Age 3, because Im writing this write-up after watching Ice Age 3, whereas I did THAT write-up prior to watching Despicable Me 3, but its very similar in its story structure. The plot very much feels in the vein of we have all these characters, and therefore we need to give them each individual storylines for no reason.

Grus plot is kind of flat and cookie cutter, namely randomly getting a twin brother (which seriously hearkens back to the trilogy rules elucidated in Scream 3), who helps him steal a diamond in an unknowing effort to get Grus job back. See, Gru and wife Lucy get fired for failing to capture a supervillain (even though they do prevent his diamond heist from succeeding in the first place). Note, said character who fires them does not exist in the rest of the film, and feels completely pointless as an addition.

Lucy, meanwhile, has hamfisted efforts to be a good mom to the girls, culminating in her rescuing them from the supervillain of the movie. Grus twin brother is weirdly a loser, despite having every reason to be successful outside of the supervillain business. And then the minions decide to abandon Gru and spend the movie regretting that decision before swooping in at the last minute. Oh, and the girls have a subplot about finding a real unicorn, and two scenes of Margot inadvertently getting engaged to a random kid, which plays more into Lucys plot than anything else.

Its all kind of dumb, but this movie is carried on its back by the charisma of Trey Parker as a goofy-ass supervillain. Hes certainly more memorable than the villains of the first movie, by virtue of being a child star who lost his fame when he went through puberty, and wants revenge on Hollywood for canceling him. As such, his entire set of mannerisms is that of a guy whos stuck in the 80s, and its wonderful. Every scene with him emulating Michael Jackson, or trying to relive his glory years, is a joy to watch, and makes up for how scattershot the rest of the film is by comparison.

Evillord: This is just a collection of hyperactive moments designed to appeal to really little kids strung together with a paper-thin plot, so it's hard to watch from a grown-up perspective. Trey Parker probably had fun playing a supervillain out to destroy Hollywood, but I had to cope with the movie by closing my eyes during his scenes and pretending I was watching South Park.

Johnbobb: I don't think any series has gone as steadily and significantly downhill as Despicable Me. The first was good! And then with every sequel and spinoff, they drop all the stuff that worked about the previous films and double down on the worst aspects. This isn't cute, it isn't funny; it's just a mind-numbing waste of time.

Ermine: Fuck this movie.

Somehow the Minions were less awful in their own movie than this one here.

I don't want to write any more, it already wasted an hour and a half of my time. It sucks.