Post by Ten on Jul 12, 2010 17:31:04 GMT -5
And by "review" I mean "a few rambling thoughts right after I saw the movie".
Is anyone going to be surprised if I find things to criticize about this film? No? No takers? Okay. With that established, allow me to tell you what I did like about Despicable Me:
Gru. Gru has an accent like Boris Badenov (yes, you should know who that is). I love accents, so the main reason I went to see this movie was to listen to Gru talk funny, because that accent is awesome. Another great thing about Gru is his nastyface, which is the >3 face he makes when he's describing the amount of bedbugs living in a mattress or something like that. It's a shame they didn't publish more stills of that face in promotional material (why didn't they? what, are they afraid he'd look like a bad guy?). Here's the closest thing I could find:
If you've watched the trailers, you know that Gru is an ambitious supervillain. But he does regular bad things, too. He's not a nice guy. He's nasty.
And he's very entertaining about it. o.o Fr srs.
That is, in the moments when the writers allow him to be entertaining. But I'll get to that later; this is the positive section.
The villain, Vector, was easy to detest. By calling him a villain I don't mean to imply that Gru is a hero. He becomes Gru's enemy, and Gru is the guy I'm rooting for, so Vector is the villain. Even without the writers going out of their way to humiliate him, Vector is someone I want to laugh at, because he's... the best way I can put it is that he's a noob. Not a newbie. A n00b.
In some stories, I sympathize with the villain, or at least prefer him to the "good guys". Despicable Me avoided this pitfall by having Vector be a stupid, annoying jerk. I wanted him to loose. Even if I didn't like the direction the plot was going, I just wanted that lame Vector to go away already. The writers seemed like they were trying to be nice to the audience by humiliating Vector every few scenes, but I'd really rather he just shut up. Disliking a character is a good thing, in this case. It's what the writers intended, and they achieved that goal.
Vector is an interesting case, because despite how lame he his, his sheer technological might allows him to be more powerful than Gru. This doubles the annoying factor. Gru has a lot more sense and style about what he does, and yet his gadgets/robots/security systems and stuff aren't as advanced as Vector's. I'm thinking that's a result of Vector having more cash, not more brains.
Now for some of my problems with this movie.
All the other characters are annoying too. I had expected the little yellow minions to be aggravating, but they weren't as bad as I thought (which still doesn't put them in the acceptable category). They were incompetent, of course, but the brats were worse.
Gru has to adopt them as part of a plan, and (surprise!) they're more of a handful than he anticipated. One issue I had with this aspect of the movie: why didn't Gru come down harder on them in the first place? Why did he start giving in to their stupid whining and crap? He's a super villain. He doesn't care about bratty little girls. The least he could do is chain them to a wall.
Writers, if you want to write some snotty orphans into your story, that's fine and dandy. You can have your snotty orphans. Nothing wrong with having unpleasant characters in a story; that's how life goes. However, here are some important don't s:
Don't make them a mere mash-up of cliches.
Once you have established them as manipulative whining snotballs, don't make them sweet and easy to please at convenient intervals.
Most of all, don't try to get me to like them and don't try to get me to want them to be the family of your best character.
Now let's see, what other characters were there? ...mm, there was a shark. Oh. That reminds me.
I don't want to put any spoilers in here -- okay, the plot is obvious, but I'd rather not try to explain this scene: there's a moment where Gru does some things that are supposed to be awesome (...I guess?) but the random appearance of those capabilities made me laugh.
There's a lot of predictable stuff, and when it involves Vector and/or Gru, it's not annoying, it's lolwhydidn'tyouseethatcoming?hahaloser. When it involves the minions or the brats, though, it is annoying. I would have preferred this movie to have a lot more of Gru, Vector, and the shark. Then it might've been good. Thanks to the brats, though, it tries to take the heartwarming route and jumps off a cliff.
Here's part of how they could have made a better story, short of removing the girls altogether: instead of having three brats who, the moment they're adopted, start irritating the crap out of this big creepy bald guy and then big creepy bald guy begins to soften up towards them, they should have been three scared little children who are very much afraid of this big creepy bald guy and then big creepy bald guy begins to soften up towards them.
Gru is a negligent parent to begin with, to say the least, but the girls are worse to him than he is to them, and that's saying something.
I hated the way the writers pushed him to start loving the brats as his daughters. I wanted the Real Gru to shine through, not this stilted wimpy doormat dad. I see enough parents who give into whining irl, kthanx. Don't force Gru to be one of them too. That's just a cheap way to vex me.
Despicable Me was teeth-grating at (most) times, but it had Gru in it, and that's enough to make some of it enjoyable. I want a good screenshot of Gru's nastyface. Now that was epic.
Is anyone going to be surprised if I find things to criticize about this film? No? No takers? Okay. With that established, allow me to tell you what I did like about Despicable Me:
Gru. Gru has an accent like Boris Badenov (yes, you should know who that is). I love accents, so the main reason I went to see this movie was to listen to Gru talk funny, because that accent is awesome. Another great thing about Gru is his nastyface, which is the >3 face he makes when he's describing the amount of bedbugs living in a mattress or something like that. It's a shame they didn't publish more stills of that face in promotional material (why didn't they? what, are they afraid he'd look like a bad guy?). Here's the closest thing I could find:
If you've watched the trailers, you know that Gru is an ambitious supervillain. But he does regular bad things, too. He's not a nice guy. He's nasty.
And he's very entertaining about it. o.o Fr srs.
That is, in the moments when the writers allow him to be entertaining. But I'll get to that later; this is the positive section.
The villain, Vector, was easy to detest. By calling him a villain I don't mean to imply that Gru is a hero. He becomes Gru's enemy, and Gru is the guy I'm rooting for, so Vector is the villain. Even without the writers going out of their way to humiliate him, Vector is someone I want to laugh at, because he's... the best way I can put it is that he's a noob. Not a newbie. A n00b.
In some stories, I sympathize with the villain, or at least prefer him to the "good guys". Despicable Me avoided this pitfall by having Vector be a stupid, annoying jerk. I wanted him to loose. Even if I didn't like the direction the plot was going, I just wanted that lame Vector to go away already. The writers seemed like they were trying to be nice to the audience by humiliating Vector every few scenes, but I'd really rather he just shut up. Disliking a character is a good thing, in this case. It's what the writers intended, and they achieved that goal.
Vector is an interesting case, because despite how lame he his, his sheer technological might allows him to be more powerful than Gru. This doubles the annoying factor. Gru has a lot more sense and style about what he does, and yet his gadgets/robots/security systems and stuff aren't as advanced as Vector's. I'm thinking that's a result of Vector having more cash, not more brains.
Now for some of my problems with this movie.
All the other characters are annoying too. I had expected the little yellow minions to be aggravating, but they weren't as bad as I thought (which still doesn't put them in the acceptable category). They were incompetent, of course, but the brats were worse.
Gru has to adopt them as part of a plan, and (surprise!) they're more of a handful than he anticipated. One issue I had with this aspect of the movie: why didn't Gru come down harder on them in the first place? Why did he start giving in to their stupid whining and crap? He's a super villain. He doesn't care about bratty little girls. The least he could do is chain them to a wall.
Writers, if you want to write some snotty orphans into your story, that's fine and dandy. You can have your snotty orphans. Nothing wrong with having unpleasant characters in a story; that's how life goes. However, here are some important don't s:
Don't make them a mere mash-up of cliches.
Once you have established them as manipulative whining snotballs, don't make them sweet and easy to please at convenient intervals.
Most of all, don't try to get me to like them and don't try to get me to want them to be the family of your best character.
Now let's see, what other characters were there? ...mm, there was a shark. Oh. That reminds me.
I don't want to put any spoilers in here -- okay, the plot is obvious, but I'd rather not try to explain this scene: there's a moment where Gru does some things that are supposed to be awesome (...I guess?) but the random appearance of those capabilities made me laugh.
There's a lot of predictable stuff, and when it involves Vector and/or Gru, it's not annoying, it's lolwhydidn'tyouseethatcoming?hahaloser. When it involves the minions or the brats, though, it is annoying. I would have preferred this movie to have a lot more of Gru, Vector, and the shark. Then it might've been good. Thanks to the brats, though, it tries to take the heartwarming route and jumps off a cliff.
Here's part of how they could have made a better story, short of removing the girls altogether: instead of having three brats who, the moment they're adopted, start irritating the crap out of this big creepy bald guy and then big creepy bald guy begins to soften up towards them, they should have been three scared little children who are very much afraid of this big creepy bald guy and then big creepy bald guy begins to soften up towards them.
Gru is a negligent parent to begin with, to say the least, but the girls are worse to him than he is to them, and that's saying something.
I hated the way the writers pushed him to start loving the brats as his daughters. I wanted the Real Gru to shine through, not this stilted wimpy doormat dad. I see enough parents who give into whining irl, kthanx. Don't force Gru to be one of them too. That's just a cheap way to vex me.
Despicable Me was teeth-grating at (most) times, but it had Gru in it, and that's enough to make some of it enjoyable. I want a good screenshot of Gru's nastyface. Now that was epic.
