Z/Web

During this movie’s opening trailers, they showed the promo for the movie Megamind, which is so similar sounding — an animated story about an incompetent evil supervillain with a superarchrival — that I realized I had two movies mixed together. I remember being surprised this was out now as I had thought it wasn’t coming until later in the year (that’s Megamind). So I really wasn’t at all sure what to expect from this. It turned out to be an enjoyable film. Though there are numerous problems with pacing and the humor’s inconsistent (it’s not very funny very often), the heart of the film is genuinely touching. Basically our bad guy is Gru (The Office’s Steve Carrell in an annoying Eastern European accent) who wants to be the best bad guy on the planet and to prove it comes up with an outrageous plot to steal the moon. There’s zero sense of reality here — no explanation of what monetary value would be obtained by doing that, nor any disastrous consequences to the planet if the moon were suddenly gone — which I found unsettling. But what makes the film work is when Gru, as part of his nefarious plot, adopts three orphan girls who proceed, via their childish innocence and charm, to sabotage all of Gru’s plans and slowly change him from a bad bad guy to a good bad guy. This part of the film is well done and I loved the way Gru’s character reluctantly changed. It was both hilarious and touching. The ending is sweet and overall I was pleased. Though the first half of the movie is somewhat rough, the core story helps smooth things over and in the end, I really liked this.