Despicable Me

Directors: Sergio Pablos, Pierre Coffin, Chris Renaud
Writers: Sergio Pablos, Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio
Starring: Steve Carell, Jason Segel
Release Date: July 9, 2010
Length: 1 hour 35 minutes

Steve Carell is known for being hilarious for an adult audience with The Office and The 40-year-old Virgin, but he has a repertoire of making kids laugh as well. In the last five years, Carell has lent his voice to films like Over The Hedge, Horton Hears A Who and now Despicable Me. Despicable Me is no different from any other hilarious kids movie like The Incredibles, Shrek or Toy Story, except for the fact you will leave the theatre completely touched by this innocent children’s film. Steve Carell is Gru, a Russian supervillian living somewhere in the United States. When competition arises in the form of another supervillian, Vector (Jason Segel), Gru plans to pull the most evil stunt ever, stealing the moon. After he sees three sisters selling cookies from an adoption agency go inside Vectors house to give him his cookies, an idea sparks in Gru’s mind. Gru decides to adopt these three girls, named Margo, Edith and Agnes, so that he can put electronic cookies in Vectors house, which he will need to find his shrink machine to shrink the moon. The girls don’t exactly love his house filled with sharp objects, almost no food, and a scary dog. As time goes on in planning to steal the moon, Gru gets to know these girls who he is taking care of. Soon enough, Gru becomes emotionally attached to these cute innocent beings, which complicates his goals in being a supervillian. The voices of Despicable Me were all authentic and well cast. There is never a problem with hiring Hollywood’s funniest comedians for a kid’s movie like Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Will Arnett, Russell Brand and Kristen Wiig. Jason Segel’s high-pitched flamboyant vocal performance as Vector was surprisingly his first time he lent his voice at all to any animation film. His performance probably made the audience laugh the most next to Steve Carell’s. Probably because he has kids of his own, Carell knows how to make kids laugh and make them love him as well. Steve Carell used his voice to portray a character that needed to be evil, but lovable enough for kids to like. Carell and the writers completed this task beautifully. Screenwriters Sergio Pablos, Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul came up with such an original idea with clever writing, funny jokes and not to mention, a touching storyline. Somewhat of my love for this film came from the adorable characters of Agnes, the youngest adopted girl and Gru’s “minions”, who also can be indentified as small yellow creatures who work for Gru and speak gibberish. The 3D effects were done perfectly, meaning the film was a lot of fun to watch at some points, but the effects were not thrown at the audience every minute. Most importantly, the 3D effects weren’t used to compensate for a bad script, which often happens. Despicable Me is not my favourite kids film of the year or the summer even (that would be Toy Story 3), but it is a funny, touching, original movie that everyone in the family can fully enjoy.