Despicable Me (2010)

There's a moment early in Despicable Me where Gru, an over-the-top supervillain with a fortress full of goggle-wearing yellow creatures, dismisses three orphan girls like they're an inconvenience on his doorstep. It's a decent comic beat. And it sets up a perfectly watchable premise: the cold-hearted baddie adopts kids as pawns, gets played by innocence, grows a heart. You've seen the shape of this story before. The question is whether the film does anything interesting inside it. Mostly, the answer is no.

That's not a savage verdict. Despicable Me is perfectly competent. The animation is clean, the pacing is brisk, and it never outstays its welcome. Steve Carell voices Gru with a cheerfully daft Eastern European accent that gives the character more warmth than the script probably deserves. The colour palette is vivid without being exhausting. For a Saturday afternoon with kids under ten, it does the job.

But doing the job and doing it well are two different things. Gru's transformation from calculating villain to soft-hearted father figure happens at a pace that robs it of any real weight. The emotional beats arrive more or less on schedule, ticked off rather than earned. You never feel the resistance in him. One minute he's dismissive and ruthless, the next he's reading bedtime stories, and the film treats that shift as though it's the most natural thing in the world. It isn't, and pretending otherwise means the whole arc lands with a soft thud instead of any genuine feeling.

The rivalry with Vector, the film's other villain, is where it becomes clear the writers were working from a checklist. He's a one-note antagonist, there to provide slapstick obstacles and a third-act stakes-raiser, and he never generates any real menace or comedic edge. The set pieces built around him are mildly amusing at best, forgotten by the time the credits roll.

And then there are the Minions. I'll be honest: I don't find them as funny as the franchise seems to think I should. They're noisy, they're visually distinctive, and they clearly struck a nerve with audiences, because the merchandise followed swiftly and the spinoffs came soon after. But their humour is almost entirely built on chaos and gibberish, which is fine in small doses and repetitive in large ones. By the time the film wraps, you're more aware of their marketing potential than their comic value. I've since sat through Minions and Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022), and neither of those exactly proved me wrong.

What Despicable Me lacks, more than anything, is the courage to sit in its feelings for a moment. The films that do this sort of found-family story well, the Pixar benchmark that everything in this genre gets measured against, understand that you have to let the emotion breathe. You have to let the character actually struggle. There's no struggle here worth the name. Gru melts. The girls win him over. Everyone goes home happy. It's sweet in the way that a plain biscuit is sweet: technically fine, completely forgettable.

I'm not trying to be harsh on a film aimed at children. Kids don't need every animated feature to gut-punch them emotionally. But the best ones manage to work on two levels at once, giving younger audiences the colour and chaos while slipping something real to the adults in the room. Despicable Me doesn't quite bother. It's engineered for broad appeal and it achieves broad appeal, in the same way a theme park gift shop achieves broad appeal. Functional, cheerful, and gone from your memory the moment you step outside.

Watch it once with your children. Laugh politely at the fart jokes. Then move on. As the launchpad for one of animation's most lucrative franchises, it makes a certain sense. As a standalone film, it's all surface and no soul.

Two and a half stars.

Rating: ★★½  | Year: 2010  | Watched: 2026-04-21

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Where to watch

Watch in the UK
Stream: Sky Go · Now TV Cinema
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Physical: Amazon UK · Zavvi

Watch in the US
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Physical: Amazon US

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Related on Movies With Macca

More from Pierre Coffin: Despicable Me 2 (2013) · Despicable Me 3 (2017) · Minions (2015)
More with Steve Carell: Beautiful Boy (2018) · Little Miss Sunshine (2006) · Dinner for Schmucks (2010) · Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)