I’ll just cut right to the chase: if you liked the first Despicable Me, you’ll almost surely like this one just as well. Heck, you might even like it a bit more.
It has everything that made the first one great; it was funny, it was cute, and it had the minions. It was well worth it to go see if only for that. 😄
One thing that particularly amused me was just how the trailers interacted with the movie itself. With the exception of the first trailer (the alien abduction one), just about everything in them was in the first few minutes of the film. For better or for worse, it starts out full tilt and doesn’t really let go from there.
On the downside (to me at least), the humor was a touch too on the juvenile side at times and it’s very much a sequel. Neither is particularly a death stroke, but both are something to watch out for. It also felt a bit more disjointed than the first, but that’s possibly a side effect of cloudy memories of the first and a distraction inducing venue1.
Overall, it was a cute movie. You could do worse. Unfortunately, it comes out head to head with Monsters University2–and MU is just flat out the better movie. Still, I’ll give it a solid #7 for the year. I had fun, which in the end is all that really matters.
Ranked: 2013 Movie Reviews
- Pacific Rim
- Frozen
- Iron Man 3
- The Croods
- Gravity
- Thor: The Dark World
- Star Trek Into Darkness
- Monsters University
- Elysium
- Ender's Game
- Man of Steel
- Django Unchained
- World War Z
- Despicable Me 2
- The Hobbit: The Desolation of Smaug
- The Hunger Games: Catching Fire
- Parental Guidance
- Oblivion
- The Mortal Instruments: City of Bones
- Beautiful Creatures
- R.I.P.D.
- Jurassic Park (3D!)
- The Wolverine
- Oz the Great and Powerful
- Hansel & Gretel: Witch Hunters
- Jack the Giant Slayer
- Warm Bodies
- Don Jon
- Turbo
- G.I. Joe: Retaliation
- Pain & Gain
As a side note, I actually went to go see this one at a drive in. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a drive in (a decade at least), but it was pretty much exactly as I remembered it. I think I’ll stick to the theaters in general, but it was a neat change of pace. ↩︎
Which I saw again as the second half of the drive in double feature. ↩︎