Despicable Me 4

Last week, Despicable Me 4, the newest film in the Despicable Me franchise, was released into theater. Despicable Me 4 follows Gru and his family as they must go in hiding when an old enemy of Gru's escapes prison. I have always enjoyed the Despicable Me films and thought they were solid family films so I was interested to see how this one would turn out.

Unfortunately, this movie was not very good. For the positives, it does have quite a few funny moments with the minions supplying most of the humorous and memorable scenes. I also thought that there were a lot of interesting ideas that the movie wanted to tackle. Any one of them would have worked as a compelling story. The big issue of the movie is that it lacks any sort of central plot and is written as a bunch of individual moments just there to set up jokes. The basic premise of Gru's enemy escaping prison sets up the film and essentially the main plot but it ends up only being present at the beginning and end of the film with the middle filled with all the individual adventures of Gru and his family. The movie reminds me a lot of The Secret Life of Pets 2 where it is just a bunch of individual plots that feel unrelated but then sort of get tied together in the end. It felt like the writers of this movie had a list of a bunch of potential ideas (Gru having a new son, Gru taking on a younger partner, the family trying to blend in undercover, Gru's high school rivalry, the Mega Minions) and instead of picking one or two, just decided to cram all of them into one movie. The movie has so many subplots that it doesn't have time spent on the main plot to link them all together. Because of this, the movie fails to recapture the charm of the other films and just makes the franchise feel a bit played out.

Overall, while it still has the jokes and humor of the franchise, this movie lacks a cohesive plot to tie it all together. They were more focused on the jokes and gags than on making a good movie. Little kids are going to still enjoy this film because of this but anyone old enough to understand the plot and structure is going to be disappointed.

Score: 5/10 Grade: C Recommendation: Wait to stream it