‘Despicable Me 4’ Review: Super Minions, Gru Jr, and a Cockroach Man Clear the Low-Quality Bar Set by this Hyperactive Franchise

Let this review serve as a warning to you, your friends, and your family: Despicable Me 4 is out, and the Minions have returned to theater screens around the world. The blobby, yellow, gibberish-talking and havoc-wreaking little helpers of reformed villain with a heart of gold Gru (Steve Carell) have sustained a healthy 14-year career and counting as the mascots of Illumination Entertainment, ever since the release of the first Despicable Me. The Minions feel like something pulled out of another lifetime ago—a time when the world was more naive and innocent. The landscape of 2024 feels like a perverse dystopia for the Minions to attempt to navigate, and yet they endure thanks to their eternal appeal as slapstick joke machines for kids, as earnest meme templates for boomers, and as a semi-ironic-but-not-quite source of comedy for disaffected millennials and zoomers.

It helps that Illumination has kept a steady stream of Minions releases flowing besides just pure merchandising. In between Despicable Me entries, they’ve been the leads in their own spin-off movies, the most recent of which, Minions: The Rise of Gru, helped to ease the relief of the notable 7-year gap between mainline Despicable Me films. One would think that such a gap would mean returning to the exploits of adult Gru, his wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), and his adopted Margo, Edith, and Agnes (Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, and Madison Polan, respectively) would feature newfound inspiration within this world of spy-movie and supervillain pastiche. Alas, this is a franchise that seems content to coast off a single note. 

In a world of myriad mindless children’s entertainment options, the stories of the Despicable Me movies have always felt particularly ramshackle, and Despicable Me 4 is no different. We catch up with Gru on assignment from the Anti-Villain League to bring in Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell, donning a similar vaguely Eastern European accent as provided by Carell). After revealing that he’s been experimenting with cockroaches to commit a Cronenberg/Kafka-like feat of body-horror transformation by turning his entire body, sans head, into a roach, Maxime is taken in by authorities—only to escape from prison a single scene later.

Meanwhile, Gru is enjoying life at home with his family, including new baby boy Gru Jr. When word from the AVL comes that Maxime has escaped prison, the organization finds it necessary to send Gru and co. packing to go incognito in a wealthy gated community while donning new identities and trying to generally stay on the down-low. This seems to repeat an already established dynamic of Gru as the former evil supervillain trying to fit into a life of domesticity, but this scenario is actually more about the entire family trying to fit into a community of WASPs. One of these elites is Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert), whose daughter Poppy Prescott (Joey King) has her own budding career as an amateur villain, and takes to Gru as a clandestine mentor. Meanwhile, Lucy and the daughters do their best to fit into the community, and we have the occasional half-hearted check-in with Maxime closing in on the family just to hold onto some semblance of a story.

A plot barely holding itself together is routine for this franchise, but it feels especially shaky in this entry. Director Chris Renaud and writers Mike White, Ken Daurio, and Cinco Paul regularly feel like they’re struggling to find meaningful activities for this now-sprawling cast of characters to participate in and as a result, some players are left to the wayside. Lucy and the daughters get a couple of serviceable scenes of comic mischief—a haircut gone wrong in Lucy’s cover as a hairstylist followed by a chaotic chase through the grocery store by the woman whose hair she wrecked are mindless but somewhat fun—but they’re noticeably playing second-fiddle to the antics of Gru, Poppy, and Gru Jr, whose escapades aren’t very inspired themselves. A heist on Gru’s alma mater with the trio makes for an amusing set piece, but ultimately an unmemorable one that, as is true for most developments in these films, flounders in trying to service a greater semblance of story or characterization.

Speaking of Gru Jr, he positions Despicable Me 4 as an unfortunate point of comparison to the much better, more deeply felt and smartly written superhero/supervillain-focused family animated movie The Incredibles. With his single tuft of hair,  Gru Jr. is strikingly similar to Jack-Jack in his character design, as well as in his role as the mute, mischievous baby who ultimately discovers his own way to help the family save the day. It exacerbates a major problem Illumination has with all of its projects: a lack of a distinct point of view. 

The Minions fare a bit better with their B-plot. In going to work for the AVL while Gru’s family goes into hiding, many become secret service-type suits at the corporation, while a select few are experimented on and turned into Mega Minions—Minions that have been given a hodgepodge of familiar superhero abilities. One is elastic like Mr. Fantastic but can swing around like Spider-Man (leading to a fun parody of the train sequence in Spider-Man 2); one is essentially Cyclops from X-Men; another is basically The Thing. The adventures of the Mega Minions are completely divorced from the main story until the last 5 minutes, but Despicable Me 4 is always closest to an actual stride when it’s letting the Minions accidentally destroy the city with powers far too great for them to handle—or just, like, slapping each other around and laughing at the word “Bottom.”

Maybe that’s why the Minions have endured so effectively. They let the creatives at Illumination engage in pure, mindless juvenalia and slapstick, a realm they always seem much more confident and comfortable in. Rather than having to write actual jokes for speaking characters, which results in things like Gru making a “honey badger don’t care” joke in the year of our lord 2024, they can go full tilt into the mindless nonsense that the Illumination brand is basically built on anyway. It even extends to their divisive animation style—the colors of the Despicable Me world always pop, but so many of the human designs seem unmemorable and simplistic, a problem that resolves itself when animating the straightforward design of the little yellow lackeys. Illumination can afford for the rest of the film to be misshapen and half-formed because the Minions are the ones meant to endure. I’m not ashamed to say the Minions make me laugh, but it’s become abundantly clear just how low the quality ceiling of the Despicable Me franchise really sits. 

Grade: C-

Universal Pictures and Illumination Entertainment will release Despicable Me 4 only in theaters on July 3, 2024.

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