BEFORE: This was sort of the "competing" film to "Megamind", released the same year, and also centered on an evil mastermind. The obvious link is from Will Ferrell to Steve Carell (last seen in "Dinner for Schmucks"), by way of "Anchorman".
THE PLOT: When a criminal mastermind uses a trio of orphan girls as pawns for a grand scheme, he finds their love is profoundly changing him for the better.
AFTER: If I have to pick a horse, I think I'll side with "Megamind" on this one - but who says I have to choose one or the other? They both came from an emotional place, they just sort of used different ways to "soften" the main characters, so even though they qualified as villains, the audience would still root for them. In the case of "Megamind", they made the villain question his role, and turned him around and had him doing heroic things. Here, they used a bit of a shortcut, and had the villain adopt three young girls (originally for a less-than-noble reason), and eventually he came to regard himself as a parent who cared about their well-being.
It's almost a cheat, because you could take any movie villain, give him a child or three, and you may come to regard him differently, assuming he's not a terrible parent. Darth Vader, Dr. Evil, Blofeld - if you saw them in a nurturing way, it would put a new spin on things.
Another trick they use here is to have another villain who's more successful than the main character, therefore logically he's more evil, right? So we can start to feel sympathetic for a villain if none of his schemes seem to work right, and he's somewhat depressed about that. We've all had things go wrong, so this was another acceptable way of humanizing an evil central character.
This film made good use of the animation format - with evil geniuses inventing all kinds of rays and flying all kinds of spaceships, and pulling off schemes that would be impossible to film in the real world. That's exactly what an animated feature should do, show you something that you wouldn't be able to see otherwise.
Oddly though, this film had the same problem as "Megamind", in that the music cues were extremely out of date. It's a kids' film, but are today's kids supposed to recognize songs like "Copacabana" and "Boogie Fever"? OK, maybe they're there for the parents, but why alienate half of your audience?
Steve Carell put on a thick Russian, or perhaps Eastern European, accent to play this role - and I can confirm, it's not easy to maintain something like that for a whole picture. I've done voice-work in other accents - German, French, Southern - and if that's not your natural voice, it can be hard to maintain. And god forbid if you have to do re-shoots a week or two later and find that voice again...
Also starring the voices of Jason Segel (last seen in "Gulliver's Travels"), Russell Brand (last seen in "Forgetting Sarah Marshall"), Will Arnett (last seen in "Jonah Hex"), Kristen Wiig (last heard in "How to Train Your Dragon"), Julie Andrews, Miranda Cosgrove, with vocal cameos from Jack McBrayer, Danny McBride (last seen in "Up in the Air"), Mindy Kaling, Rob Huebel, Ken Jeong (last seen in "Furry Vengeance").
RATING: 6 out of 10 bedtime stories
I like this a lot. It's "cartoon villainry" in which the bad guys are more like pop stars, pulling off Crimes Of The Century as opposed to crashing planes into buildings. That takes care of most of the difficulty of the premise. It's a world of one-upmanship rather than world domination.
ReplyDeleteThe Minions are super-damned-funny.
And it's a solid premise. I wish the story had been a little more thought-out. As is, the movie gets Gru to where he needs to be (genuinely caring about the girls) without really putting him through the necessary steps. I imagined the next draft of the script that hit on the fact that there isn't a natural force of nature more potentially destructive than a little kid. The kids would think Gru is AWESOME. He'd be getting some validation that he wasn't getting elsewhere annnd we're off and running.
Still Good flick.