despicable me

I actually watched this some time ago, but found it a bit difficult to write a review for.

I did enjoy the film, and that's really the problem.  I've said many times before it's harder to write the reviews where basically you liked the film and want to recommend it.

The thing here, I guess, is I was a little trepidations about the film.  I'd heard what it was basically about and it appealed as a concept, the thing I was worried about, though, is that it would fall over when it came to the nice ending aspect.

I don't know why you wouldn't know, but the film is essentially about a super villain and how he tries to use three young girls in one of his schemes.  I guess I should warn for spoilers, but of course the point of the film is he comes to genuinely care for the girls, and that was what I was worried about.  Or rather, I was worried it wouldn't quite work - a film like this can easily fail at the whole aspect of him coming round to love them.  It's something that has to be properly earned, and that can be a tricky thing to pull off properly.

And that's why I liked the film - it does a really good job at earning that ending.  It also doesn't totally cave in - he's still basically a super-villain at the end, although perhaps one who is reforming.

IF I was to make one criticism of the film it would be the minions.  With characters like that there's a really fine line with making them cute and loveable and clearly just an attempt to sell toys.  In this case I have to say for me they were on the wrong side of that line.

I think part of my problem was that there was also another character, Dr Nefario, who was meant to be an evil scientist character.  The problem I had was that overlapped quite a lot with Gru and the minions, but the minions could only talk in gibberish.  I can understand the problem he was there to solve (the minions only talk gibberish and Gru is otherwise on his own, so who does he talk to and how, therefore, do we advance things like plot?) but the problem is it introduces some redundancy.

So if Gru had been an evil-genius scientist as well (somebody needs to build the death rays, et all, right?) then the Dr would be redundant.  If the minions are weird geniuses types who madly invent things (they did still seem to sort of do this) then the Dr is redundant.  But in both those cases, who does Gru talk to that the audience can also understand?

As such you're left with the minions being like gofers, which was okay, but I dunno, to me it made them fairly pointless, and because they're cute they then start to feel like a way to sell toys.

I know - I'm really overanalysing this, but then, as I said at the top, I liked the film and don't really have much else to say!