'Despicable Me 2': Carell helps calm cheap scares ★★ 1/2

Kristen Wiig makes it a Gru-some twosome

Michael Phillips

July 3, 2013



This time Gru is placed in the takes-one-to-catch-one mold of Hannibal Lecter. An arctic research lab gets sucked up into space by a giant magnet in the prologue. The Anti-Villain League (Kristen Wiig voices Lucy, the sweet, tightly wound AVL agent) recruits Gru to track down the villain in question, El Macho. Much of "Despicable Me 2" takes place in an antiseptic "Logan's Run"-styled mall, where Gru and Lu work undercover, and their fellow tenants include a hair-club toupee peddler (Ken Jeong, voice) and a seductive Mexican restaurant owner (Benjamin Bratt, taking over for the originally slated Al Pacino) whose dreamy teenage son (Moises Arias) catches the eye of Gru's oldest (Miranda Cosgrove).

To my taste, as well as that of several nervous preteens in the preview audience, the script by Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio ("The Lorax," "Horton Hears a Who!") goes in for an awful lot of cheap scares, notably when the Minions are injected with a serum changing them into hairy, menacing purple beasts. Would it kill a movie such as this to find another way to keep the target audience in its collective seat? The Minions are amusing, but they remain largely undifferentiated creatures, saved from pure generica only by their peppy gibberish-based language skills, heavy on the flatulence sound effects.



MPAA rating: PG (for rude humor and mild action)

Running time: 1:38

Opens: Wednesday