Brace yourself self for an admission of guilt about Despicable Me 2. The truth of the matter is I’ve never seen the first Despicable Me, though my 8-year-old daughter has long ranked it as her favorite movie, and my wife swears its hilarity is as rich for adults as it is for the kids. But that’s not my real confession. Rather, it’s this: about forty-five minutes into Despicable Me 2 I fell asleep. Really asleep. Dead asleep. So much asleep that when I woke up and the film was entering its final showdown between the villain El Macho (Benjamin Bratt) and anti-villain Gru (Steve Carell), I was suddenly gripped with fear that for at least an hour I had been snoring loudly in a crowded movie theater. Luckily, I had brought my two daughters (ages five and eight), and after the screening, I asked them.
“Was I snoring?”
“No,” said the eight-year-old. “I looked over at you and thought, ‘Oh good, he’s not asleep.’”
I’m still not sure why she might have suspected that I was asleep; after all, she loved the movie. But the key point here is I was wearing 3D glasses so she couldn’t see just how completely passed out I was.
“What did I miss?” I asked. I told her I fell asleep somewhere around the point where all those cute Despicable Me yellow people were turning blue and woke up somewhere around where the good guys were shooting jam out of helicopter.
“Um, everything,” the eight-year-old replied.
So, without enough content to draw my own conclusions about the quality of the movie I had just missed, I decided to rely on the sensibilities of the two little proto-critics I had brought with me to the film. How did they like it? They loved it. But why? The problem is I know the girls tend to love anything that is on a screen and moves, particularly when what is moving is brightly colored, cute, and animated. Animals also get high marks.
“What did you like about it?” I asked.
“The blue guys,” the eight-year-old said. The blue guys, from what I was able to pick out from either side of my nap, were Gru’s famous minions – the goofy, goggles-wearing urchins that speak in a kind of mumbled faux-French. In the new movie, there’s a secret serum that turns anything it touches into ravenous beast versions of itself. (Didn’t we see this exact same thing in Wallace and Gromit’s The Curse of the Were-Rabbit? But I digress.) The lovable yellow minions are stolen by the resurrected bad guy El Macho, who builds an army of ravenous evil blue minions. Gru, who has been recruited into some anti-villain private security force (gosh, with all the NSA, Blackwater stuff out there suddenly these pseudo-James Bond motifs don’t seem as playful), joins forces with the lovably hapless Lucy (Kristen Wiig) to stop El Macho. Oh, and Gru’s kids join in on the fun as well. I’m not sure how Gru has kids, but I just assume that’s a detail handled in Despicable Me 1.
So, I asked the five-year-old: what was your favorite part?
“The birthday party,” she said. Luckily, that bit comes at the film’s beginning and I was awake for it. But I was still surprised by her response. All the birthday party is a scene of Gru’s youngest daughter’s Agnes’ (Elsie Kate Fisher) birthday party. It’s princess-themed, and my five-year-old is still in the throws of a multi-year princess obsession. So maybe it was the cake or the pretty dresses, but it certainly couldn’t have been the catty soccer mom who is trying to fix Gru up with another mother. But then my five-year-old added, “And when Gru dressed up like a princess.”
“Oh yeah,” the eight-year-old chimed in. “That was funny.”
Ahh, that makes sense, but I’m still skeptical. Yes, I saw the Gru cross-dressing bit. A little Bugs Bunny, but not exactly Duck Soup, which I’ve tried to show to my kids, and much to my disappointment, discovered that there are moving things on screens that don’t yet hold their attention. But fine, I’ll give them the humor of an exaggeratedly oversized villain-ish guy with a pointy nose and tiny legs wearing a pink dress. That’s funny, I guess. Funny enough to keep them engaged and ready for the entrance of those hungry, slobbering blue guys, the jam, and, of course, the flatulent canon. But not quite funny enough to keep an exhausted father from drifting off.
