Review: 'Despicable Me 4' has enough laughs, too many characters

It’s all happened so fast.

“Despicable Me” — a romp about an awkward supervillain-turned-hero voiced by Steve Carell and supported by these goofy, little, yellow Minions from a new animation studio then called Illumination Entertainment — arrived less than 15 years ago.

Today, “Despicable Me” is a huge franchise, in fact the most successful animated empire in history, with $4.6 billion tallied up for what’s now called simply Illumination and its parent company, Universal Pictures.

You can understand, then, why the series’ sixth entry, “Despicable Me 4,” is landing in theaters only two years after its predecessor, prequel “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” was released. (That film alone earned nearly a cool billion bucks worldwide.)

While sufficiently entertaining and, as is the “Despicable” way, seasoned with just the right amount of gleeful subversiveness, this latest adventure cooked up for the Fourth of July crowds isn’t the franchise’s strongest.

This isn’t exactly a new issue for “Me,” but “4” is, unquestionably, overstocked with characters. Director (and franchise co-creator) Chris Renaud has his hands full with Gru, wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig), adopted daughters Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Madison Polan) and the newest member of the family, baby boy Gru Jr. — along with that horde of minions (again voiced, hilariously, by Pierre Coffin). And that’s before you factor in the requisite villain, the Will Ferrell-voiced but forgettable Maxime Le Mai, his femme fatale girlfriend, Valentina (Sofia Vergara), and another newcomer, Poppy Prescott (Joey King).

Although the latter gets a relatively sizable amount of screen time, the movie would have benefited from more of this gifted girl with supervillainous ambitions, who puts the screws to Gru as he and the family are hiding out in suburbia.

Gru and company find themselves in this pickle after Gru, an agent for the Anti-Villain League, arrests Maxime, a rival since their school days. Maxime, who has a serious affinity for the cockroach — and its “unsquishability” — promises to exterminate Gru after being bested by him at a school alumni function. (By the way, Gru arrives at the school, very coolly, in a sports car, followed by a few of the Minions, decidedly less coolly and quite clumsily, in a much smaller version of said car. It’s the first of the movie’s delightful, clever-as-always Minion-centric sequences.)

Maxime almost immediately escapes from prison and, backed by Valentina and an army of cockroach minions — sets out to kidnap Gru’s son.

And thus the hiding and fake identities for Gru — who’s now solar panel salesman Chet Cunningham — and the clan in the idyllic town of Mayflower. Lucy, er, Blanche has trouble faking it as a skilled hairdresser, while Gru gets nowhere trying to chum it up with yuppy neighbor Perry Prescott (Stephen Colbert). The biggest problem, though, is Perry’s daughter, as Poppy knows her one-time supervillains and wants something from Gru to stay quiet.

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