Despicable Me 3 (2017)

Despicable Me 3 (2017)

IMDB Rating 6.9/10 (as on 17.06.2017)

After he is fired from the Anti-Villain League for failing to take down the latest bad guy to threaten humanity, Gru finds himself in the midst of a major identity crisis. But when a mysterious stranger shows up to inform Gru that he has a long-lost twin brother-a brother who desperately wishes to follow in his twin's despicable footsteps-one former super-villain will rediscover just how good it feels to be bad.

PG | 1h 30min | Animation, Action, Adventure

Directors: Kyle Balda, Pierre Coffin | 1 more credit »

Writers: Ken Daurio (characters), Ken Daurio (screenplay)

Stars: Jenny Slate, Kristen Wiig, Steve Carell

IMDB link Here

Movie Rating ★★☆☆☆  

Minions lose out to Dru’s family and it’s not funny

Shalini Langer

It’s hard to see what Despicable Me 3 is getting at, apart from giving Gru (still voiced by Steve Carell) an expanding family that now includes a long-separated twin, in long, blond hair and full-white ensemble. In the process, the Minions have now been pushed almost completely out of the frame, making them totally superfluous despite still getting the largest laughs.

The film essentially revolves around a worn-out TV star of the 1980s, Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker), who continues to bear a grudge at the way his show was phased out and has taken to stealing. He also has a long-running rivalry with Gru, which is unexplained apart from the fact that Gru is now part of the Anti-Villain League. Bratt steals a pink diamond from under Gru’s nose, and Gru gets fired as a spy because of it, making him eager for revenge.

But that’s only part of what Despicable Me 3 is about. There is the twin, and there is Gru’s wife Lucy’s (Kristen Wiig) attempts to woo over his daughters, and the two worlds seldom meet. Carell voices both Gru and the twin Dru, who wants to become a super-villain as their dad once was, but the film has just too many things going to stick to what could have been an interesting relationship. Nor is there enough of the warmth between Gru and his daughters that made the heart of the other two Despicable Me films.

The film instead relies on humour and poor visual gags to fill the gaps. And when these run up short, the fact that Despicable Me is essentially on the same page since the first film is more and more obvious.

Read full review at Indian Express

Makes you jive to its loony tunes

Kennith Rosario

In 2010, we were welcomed aboard a madcap ride – one that promised to be nothing more than silly and filled with Looney Tunes-like humour – accompanied by the grumpy villain Gru (Steve Carell) and his absolutely addictive minions. Along the way we picked up three adorable little girls and a fiercely badass lover Lucy (Kristen Wiig). Some minions we lost on the way, gained some new. In the third edition, the makers of Despicable Me 3 acquaint us with Gru’s hidden twin Dru, amp up the physical comedy, increase the dose of pop-culture references, sprinkle cheery music by Pharrell Williams and top it up with some quirky references to the ’80s.

Despicable Me 3 begins with Gru getting fired as an Anti-Villian League agent, and discovers that he has a twin brother who lived with his father after his parents separated. His mother (Julie Andrews) kept him in the dark about it, all his life. “But you told me my father died with disappointment when I was born,” exclaims Gru, with utmost sincerity.

Thus begins a new chapter in Gru’s life. Along with his brother Dru, he sets out to execute one last heist. On the sidelines, Gru’s minions conduct a mutiny and land up in hilariously bizarre situations, lost in a trip of their own. Lucy is struggling with the sudden responsibility of being a mother. And the kids, well, they thankfully never grow up.

For Carell, the film is a playground to explore his tone, pitch, accent and imitation with this double role. He clearly has a ball doing that. Wiig flaunts her Saturday Night Live expertise of slipping into a character’s voice effortlessly. The animation is vibrant and bursting with colours. The 3D is harmless (some would say unnecessary). And the writing is all centered around one mission: to be fast-paced and crazy.

Apart from being its loony best, the first edition of Despicable Me melts your heart as you witness a burly, grumpy villain adopting three orphan girls. While the third installment lacks those moments, it’s not a complaint because not every third part can be as moving as Toy Story 3. The appeal of Despicable Me 3 is epitomised in one particular scene, where – after a long day’s wait in the woods – Gru’s youngest daughter Agnes returns with a one-horned baby goat, and is pleased with herself for capturing a unicorn, who also loves her back. Realising that he needs to tell her the truth, Gru sits Agnes down and says,

“Life is like that, honey. You expect a unicorn but you get a one-horned goat.” Agnes looks at her father and then at the goat, and while almost about to tear up, she yelps, “But I love it!”. With Despicable Me 3, does it matter if it’s a unicorn or a one-horned goat as long as you love it?

Read full review at The Hindu

Movie Rating ★★✬☆☆  

 Third act of favourite franchise falls flat

Jake Wilson

There are several brains behind the digitally animated Despicable Me series, but whoever came up with the Minions deserves the lion's share of the profits.

These mischievous yellow blobs – sidekicks to sometime supervillain Gru (voiced by Steve Carell​) – are the very essence of what small children will eternally find funny.

About the durability of the series in general, I'm less sure. In the first instalment, the surly Gru had to rediscover his softer side, in the process giving reassurance to viewers who might be scared of their dads.

But since then he's worn his heart on his sleeve, fighting for law and order alongside his wife (Kristen Wiig​) and doting on their three adopted daughters. That leaves the character with nowhere much to go.

Directed by Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda – who also collaborated on the recent Minions spin-off – Despicable Me 3 marks the point that TV shows typically get to around season seven, when the writers have run out of viable plot lines and have to fill the void with desperate, random invention.

Given the feeling that anything can happen, I was hoping the climax would see the return of Gru and Dru's apparently deceased father, ideally to be voiced by Werner Herzog.

In the absence of any such twist to raise the stakes, the film retains the routine quality of a drawn-out sitcom episode, alternating between slapstick and sentiment.

Viewed in that light, it raises at least the occasional grin. Adults will appreciate the background gags in the tradition of MAD magazine, especially in the scenes set in Hollywood, where glimpsed billboards advertise imaginary movies even sillier than this one.

Preschoolers, the main target audience, will probably like it best when the Minions show their bums.

Read full review at Sydney Morning Herald

Repeating a formula that worked like gangbusters in the last installment, which became the most profitable film in Universal history, Despicable Me 3 offers up more of the same: more Gru — actually Gru times two if you count his twin brother, Dru; more Minions (though thankfully less than in their own exhausting 2015 spinoff); more Looney Tunes-esque sight gags; more pop-culture references, with an emphasis on the 1980s this time; and more catchy Pharrell Williams songs on the soundtrack.

It’s an if-it-ain’t-broke-then-don’t-fix-it approach that works just fine if you’re simply looking to take another ride on the rollercoaster, with Steve Carell and Kristen Wiig returning to voice a pair of lovey-dovey superspy parents out to rid the world of evil yet again. Indeed, the original film’s enticing premise, about a bad guy who can’t help turning good, has been somewhat forgotten, even if series creator Pierre Coffin (working here with Kyle Balda and co-director Eric Guillon) tries to insert a bit of pathos and family matters into the action. Otherwise, this rather clever, breakneck-paced cartoon gives fans exactly what they want: Like the new nemesis voiced by Trey Parker, it shoots mulitple machine-gun bursts of bubblegum at the audience, asking them to chew and enjoy.

Coffin and his fellow directors — working with returning scribes Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio — keep several balls in the air at once, kicking off the second act by introducing Dru (Carell again, though with a less pronounced Slavic accent), a long-lost twin brother who seems to be everything Gru isn’t, all the way down to a swath of blond hair that Donald Trump could only dream of implanting. But things are not necessarily what they seem, and the brotherly love turns into something else as we learn more about Gru’s family history, including a brief cameo from his mother (Julie Andrews), who looks like she’s caught in a pool scene from a softcore Italian porno.

There are plenty of other outlandish jokes here, such as a French character that's a spitting image of Gerard Depardieu, a rather outré depiction of a fictional European island (whose inhabitants include lots of cheese-eating kids, a bunch of drunks and a somewhat offensively rendered woman with major facial hair) and, in what may be the film’s piece de resistance, two laugh-out-loud Minion sketches: one that may be a direct reference to the song-and-dance number in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and a prison sequence scored to Pharrell’s hit “Freedom.”

The filmmakers seem to be having a blast, sometimes at our expense but most of the time in a lively and bonkers enough way that forces you to clap along (to quote Pharrell’s hit from the last movie). With a running time of only 96 minutes, not including credits for all 550 crew members, the pacing is so fast that there’s barely room to breathe — although Coffin puts just enough emphasis on Gru’s “issues” and just enough throwaway gags (cue up another Minion) to keep the movie grounded.

Things of course wind up leading to a big-bang final battle where the notion of Hollywood excess literally comes home to roost. One could perhaps see such an ending as a form of industry self-mockery in the way that, say, the Lego movies like to poke fun at their own existence. But the Despicable Me franchise, which has grossed $1.5 billion and counting thus far, hardly needs to look deep into its soul for further meaning. It has its recipe perfectly down pat by now, and with further installments likely on the horizon, it only asks that we laugh with it all the way to the bank.

Read full review at Hollywood Reporter