Despicable Me 4

The Architecture of Chaos

At a certain point a franchise stops behaving like a story and starts operating like weather. That is where *Despicable Me 4* lives. You do not really follow it so much as stand in it while noise, color, and small yellow maniacs blow past your face. Fourteen years after Steve Carell first gave Gru that pinched, villainous purr, Illumination's biggest machine is still whirring away. It works, more or less, but now you can hear the strain in the gears.



Chris Renaud returns to direct after steering the first two films, and he comes back with the same maximalist instinct: keep piling bits on the screen until at least a few of them hit. This time Gru, Lucy, the girls, and baby Gru Jr. are shoved into suburban witness protection because Maxime Le Mal is after them. Maxime, voiced with gusto by Will Ferrell, is a French-sounding villain who has fused his DNA with a cockroach. Why a cockroach? I honestly do not know, but it gives the animators an excuse for a lot of twitchy legs and gross little details, so I suppose that is the answer.

The movie's rhythm is not rhythm so much as impact. It lurches from idea to idea like a drum set being thrown down the stairs. The new Minion-superhero detour is the clearest example. A selected batch of Minions gets powers in a sequence that winks shamelessly at the Fantastic Four and the X-Men, and some of the animation is genuinely delightful. The stretchy Minion snapping back into place has a lovely rubber-band feel to it. The problem is that none of it really belongs to the family story the movie keeps pretending to have. Matt Donato at *Paste* summed it up well when he said the plot "feels like a collection of shorts Scotch-taped together."



Carell's vocal work is oddly interesting at this stage of the series. Gru used to have a little edge. Now he mostly sounds weary, and that choice fits. You can practically hear Carell sighing between lines as Gru tries to connect with his unimpressed baby. Ferrell, meanwhile, is back in animated-supervillain mode fourteen years after *Megamind*, and he does what Ferrell does: turns syllables into elaborate little performance stunts. It is funny for a while, though Maxime never becomes much more than an accent with antennae.

Sometimes you just stop resisting and let the nonsense wash over you. I laughed at a truly idiotic bit with a Minion stuck in a vending machine, mostly because the shot lingers on his flattened yellow face for exactly the right extra beat. That is the movie's sweet spot: dumb physical comedy delivered with real timing.



What remains is less a satisfying narrative than a highly efficient distraction. It asks nothing, leaves very little behind, and perhaps that is part of the appeal. Gru will grumble, the Minions will babble, Ferrell will vamp, and the frame will keep bursting with primary colors until the whole thing finally sputters into the credits. There is a strange reliability to that, even if the spark is not what it used to be.