The difference between the Despicable Me and Minions movies is whether they focus on the Gru family or on the Minions as the central crux of the story. The playbook remains the same. The Minions remain funny because they are. They are yellow. They remind us of silent comedies. They are annoying. That’s funny. The Gru storylines are rote but fine, always essentially about the same thing, too: how a supervillain becomes a super Dad. These are built out of modestly entertaining plots.
The events of the four Despicable Me movies go something like this: Gru adopts three daughters as part of his ne-er-do-well schemes but they change him and he’s reformed as a secret agent; Gru must balance the domestic struggles of fatherhood with his career as an agent; Gru’s long-lost brother emerges and they learn what it means to fight for your family while remaining an individual; and now, the Gru family enter witness protection and learn how, through working together, they can overcome anything as a family. Within this tetralogy, characters flatly develop and affix their growth to the needs of basic plot beats. It’s functional character-building charted one-dimensionally, but each movie has a different idea about family.
What remains the same is that these movies only exist to make money and to make us giggle. It is an easy-going proposition. Sure, take the kids out to Despicable Me 4, you already know that you can count on having several laughs and that the Minions will be Minions and that Gru will explore new sides of the same old story. It’s a reliable formula for making money and getting kids out to the theaters.
The yellow meme creatures are still fun because they always are. They may not elevate these movies to being great, memorable works, as their gags come and go quickly, built off silly non-sequitur visual humor: mining old cartoons and silent comedies, the Minions get to do some funny and clever things, and remain delightful / mildly annoying / just as designed. They have one difference in Despicable Me 4 and the movie sort of blows the whole gag, as the Minions can now become Mega Minions, which is barely explored and feels like a concept that ought to be used in a Minions movie instead, where they are not shifted to the background plot.
The prime text remains pretty uninvolving too, needing to stay so simple that any kid can follow it, and not requiring much specificity, and so it feels like a dozen other films, and all of the ones in this franchise before it. It’s all blending together: Gru and wife Lucy have a son, and Gru Jr. becomes a central motivating force as several mostly arbitrary and loosely explored subplots emerge.
The plotting no longer coheres to become any sort of story at all. The events of the movie now feel like arbitrary asides stuck in as moments of character introductions and clichéd character building. There’s the family’s move to witness protection, a new teenage antihero who coaxes Gru into helping her, a bank heist, a bug-like villain who wants to turn everyone else into bugs too, the development of Mega Minions, a father-son story, the family learning to adapt to an unnatural new setting, and a new Pharrell Williams song that seems to factor into the ongoing Rap Battle between Drake and Kendrick Lamar. So many ideas, not enough commitment to allow any one idea to breathe.
The movie ambles along that way, throwing things at the wall and not waiting to see if they stick or not. Onto the next half-baked idea. It’s still cute and diverting but is so deeply distracted and unable to commit to its own plots, failing to bring them all together into a story, that it’s an awfully messy prospect as a complete movie. The fun of these movies remains the same: kids will love the BTS (the Korean pop group) references, a funny Dance Dance Revolution sequence, a great gag with a Minion stuck inside a vending machine, and the slightly explored new capacities of the Mega Minions. Any of the working factors could be expanded upon and create a more holistic movie, but that is not so much the point. The point is to make money. And this movie is about to make so much money.