I do not own this picture. Despicable Me 2 and/or El Poder Delas Ideas owns it all.
I enjoyed 2010's "Despicable Me" immensely, so I approached "Despicable Me 2" with a wary eye. "Despicable Me" told a funny, sweet, self-contained story about a guy named Gru (Steve Carrell) who renounces villainy and embraces fatherhood. It ended on a note that required no further speculation. Satisfied viewers like me sang "So Long, Farewell" to Gru and his crew. Reps at Universal looked at "Despicable Me's" $251 million dollar domestic box office gross and sang "Never Can Say Goodbye." So, another summer weekend brings another summer sequel.
"Despicable Me 2" is as serviceable as it is unnecessary. Therein lies the rub for me. Here I sit on the fence between 2-1/2 and 3 stars, unsure of where I will fall. On the "thumbs down" side, there's dissatisfaction with a returning hero who is far blander than his original incarnation; he's been neutered by the one thing that made "Despicable Me"'s ending so satisfying. On the "thumbs-up" side is a series of clever touches made with love and attention by cast and crew. These moments are so good I almost feel despicable for being undecided. So this review is a battle between Evil Film Critic Odie and Emotional Moviegoer Odie. You have a luxury I currently do not: You can look at the star rating above and see who won.
The opening of "Despicable Me 2" is an example of its brash cleverness. An entire intelligence team and their outpost is attacked by a huge horseshoe magnet straight out of that Warner Bros. cartoon subsidiary, The Acme Company. Almost everyone and everything is pulled comically into the sky and relocated, save for a port-a-potty and its terrified inhabitant. This act of vandalism attracts the attention of the AVI, an organization that tracks and reports the kind of villainy Gru partook in back in the days of "Despicable Me." The AVI sends out agent Lucy (Kristen Wiig) to ask Gru to use his powers of villainous deduction to figure out who's behind these extreme demonstrations of magnetic personality. Lucy's idea of asking nicely is electrocuting Gru with a "lipstick taser" before tossing him into the trunk of her superspy car-slash-plane-slash-boat.
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