Tag: Julie Andrews

Oh my damn. Here we go. A continuation of a bad franchise, hitting its trilogy mark after an equally bad spinoff. Does that sound familiar? This summer is Deja Vu-ing.

I will be honest when I went in with the lowest of expectations with Despicable Me 3. I mean, how could it get worse? It really couldn’t. It would just be more of the same, probably.

But it was announced over a year ago that Trey Parker, of BASEketball, Cannibal! The Musical, and yes, South Park fame would be voicing the villain. Parker! Crude humorist! Apparently it is something a lot of R rated people do, voice a kids movie so that their kids can finally see something that they have done.

At first I thought it was just another rando-celebrity signing instead of a nice voice actor. But then I remembered that Parker is a voice actor, he voices a shit ton of characters. So it won’t just be his regular talking voice, but an actual character! Hooray!

And that character ends up sounding up mostly like Randy Marsh.

And if you look closely, it should look a bit like a Randy too.

For whatever reason, this franchise still exists with the title of Despicable Me, because as we all know, Gru (Steve Carell) is now a “good guy” taking care of his girls and his wife, Lucy (Kristen Wiig), who needs no taking care of. They are both members of the Anti-Villain League, and you know, trying to stop the bad guys.

After a failed encounter with Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker), an 80’s kid TV star whose show was cancelled due to puberty, and now world villain playing his character as an adult and relying on 80’s themed reference weapons, Gru and Lucy are fired from the AVL! Boo new director (Jenny Slate).

Sad times, being fired and jobless. But he promises to not resort back to villainy, for his girls (Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Nev Scharrel. Note: the last one is new, Agnes used to be Elsie Fisher but I guess she got too old). Also, hey look at the timing, he gets a notice that his long lost twin brother is looking for him. Apparently his parents got divorced when they were babies and they decided to break up the twins. The fuck, right?

Blah blah blah, his brother is Dru (Steve Carell), super rich and lives in a land that is like Denmark, or Northern Europe. It is time for Gru to learn about the family business…being a bad guy! His dad was a famous bad guy, and now Dru wants Gru to teach him how to be bad. Oh no.

Also featuring the voices of Steve Coogan, Julie Andrews, and Adrian Ciscato.

Don’t worry, Dru also speaks in a high pitched voice to help tell them apart.

Despicable Me 3 is basically as bad as I had imagined, but not worse. For those keeping track, I am saying that Despicable Me 3 is a better movie than Cars 3. It had issues, but not as many. It had some better moments, but not too many.

It is another franchise that decides to keep adding permanent characters to keep things interesting, instead of just making an interesting story with the characters we have. Last one we got Lucy, now we have a now twin brother Dru. However, having Gru’s father being a very famous villain/criminal who was super successful, is shit. They show photos of him in the new lair, and yes, he looks like Gru. So somehow Gru, master villain himself, has never heard of another bad guy who is older than him but looks almost identical? Unheard of. It is such a cheap cop out to introduce sudden new family members, and quite lazy.

Speaking of characters, there are too many and therefore not enough plot for all of them. Like poor Edith, I think that is the middle kid. She just exists in this film. She has a handful of lines, but doesn’t have her own story like the other two girls. Their stories Margo and Agnes, are incredibly minor though and just feel like filler because of too many characters.

The movie has the minions leave Gru, because they need to be bad things and need a villain, but he doesn’t want to. Hooray less minions right? Nope. Two of them stay behind so we get to have them with Gru still, and we get to see their minion adventures as they wander the town and prison.

I guess I don’t have a lot more else to say. With Despicable Me 3, you get a lot more of the same. The plot is weak, the sideplots are weak, some catchphrases to get people quoting the film, the animation is kind of shit (where the characters are all extremes, like too thin, too fat, etc), but that has been the norm. Just another bad animated film in the year with a lot of bad animated films.

Pitch for this movie: “You know how we like to have former wrestlers, or action people, do emasculating things for our entertainment! Well what about a Tutu?! But not a Ballerina…a Tooth Fairy maybe!”

Surprised actually that the whole movie isn’t just him dancing in this. For 90 minutes.

Dwayne Johnson plays a hockey player. Hells yeah! But not in the NHL, the “Lansing Ice Wolves”, a make believe team that is a feeder team to the LA Kings. He used to be good at scoring and stuff, but in one fight he knocked out some guys teeth. They started to call him the Tooth Fairy, and then he turned into a large defensemen who hits hard and fights hard.

He is dating Ashley Judd, who has two kids. Because kids don’t scare him! But he does kind of tell the daughter the Tooth Fairy isn’t real, for gambling monies. So he gets a summons.

And bam. Tooth Fairy world. Oh he is being punished for making people not believe? They use their belief to actually do magic, fly, and tooth fairy stuff? Stephen Merchant is his fairy case worker, has no wings, and Julie Andrews is the head fairy, punishing him? That’s crap. He has a couple of weeks of fairy duty, in which when beckoned, he must show, sprouts wings, costume and everything.

So he has to deal with his punishment, using a big bag of tricks to get the job done, while also trying to not screw up his love life (relationship with not his kids), and maybe get his hockey career back on track, from thug to stud, before some young wanna-be Crosby takes away all the attention he used to have.

Now assuming this movie is good, it is about getting your life back on track, and hockey, and magic. Hopefully they don’t try to ruin it with some direct to video sequel.

Oh god no.

But was it good?

I have a problem with movies that claim certain things are real, despite the characters best wisdom. If it was a kid discovering that Santa was real, that can be fine. But if it was a parent discovering that Santa was real, despite years of placing out presents pretending to be Santa…does that make sense to you? Same situation with the Tooth Fairy. They put out the money themselves, and even replaced it one The Rock took it. Clearly there was a precedence of them always placing money for teeth. Yet also there are tooth fairies that do that for real, and somehow the parents also do it?

Fuck that noise. In movie watching we call that shit nonsensical and a plot hole. I can accept a world where the tooth fairy, magic, Santa, big foot, all that exists. I cannot accept a movie where they exist, and characters actions contradict their existence.

Although there was amusing moments, for sure. Watching the Rock get the teeth was entertaining, I will give you that. But even the hockey moments, of which they are numerous, was iffy. If you know the rules of hockey, the games don’t make sense at all. Penalties on fair plays, and bad plays no calls. And they aren’t that many scenes. So that inaccuracy just seems silly, especially since they try hard to get even names of the actual Kings at the time right.

Alright. The amount of plot holes and inaccuracies just ruined it overall for me. Easy fixes too. But Billy Crystal‘s two scenes were hilarious.