Movie Review: Despicable Me

Despicable Me: A Movie Review
Starring Steve Carrell, Miranda Cosgrove, Elsie Fisher

Despicable Me is about an evil villain named Gru, who adopts three orphaned girls to use them as pawns in an evil scheme, but he grows fond of them and they change his life forever.

In Egypt, a group of tourists arrive at the Great Pyramid of Giza. A young, obnoxious boy tries to pretend he’s a fighter pilot, and he crosses the security line into an abandoned construction site. The boy falls off, and lands on the Pyramid, and to everybody’s surprise, the Pyramid sucks in and shoots the boy out, as if it was made of rubber. The Pyramid then deflates, and the news that someone had stolen the Great Pyramid shocked the world.

In a completely normal neighborhood, there is one house that stands out. This house is four stories high, old and rickety, and the front lawn is dead. This is the house (or base) of Gru. Little did anyone know, that old, spooky, mansion contains a high-tech laboratory, where Gru and his companion, Dr. Nefario, and Gru’s army of minions (see picture) experiment and invent. After hearing about the Pyramid heist, Gru becomes jealous of the mysterious master thief, and so he decides to pull off the biggest heist in the history of the universe: steal the Moon. Gru needs to first steal a shrink ray from Eastern-Asia, but otherwise, he has his plan all lined out. One other thing he needs a loan from the Bank of Evil to build a rocket that will reach the moon. In the waiting room, Gru meets another villain called Vector. To Gru, Vector appears to be somewhat of a nerd, and no good at being evil. Once his turn has come, Gru explains his plan to the bank president, and the president is impressed, but refuses to provide the loan until Gru gets the shrink ray. Gru is angry, and freezes Vector’s head on the way out of the bank.

Gru and three of his minions travel to the base where the shrink ray is held, and steals it. Suddenly, Vector comes out of nowhere with his ship and steals the shrink ray once more, and shrinks Gru’s ship. Vector brings the shrink ray back to his lair, and Gru is faced with the challenge of stealing the shrink ray once again.

After many failed attempts to get into Vector's lair, Gru spots three girls who are heading towards the lair to sell cookies. Seeing this, Gru snickers, because he thinks that it would be impossible for three children to get into such a highly armored building. To Gru's shock, Vector opens the door for the cookie sellers, and they walk right in. Gru decides to capture the girls to use them to try to resteal the shrink ray, and since the girls live at an orphanage, he unwillingly adopts them. After retreating to his laboratory, and leaving the girls alone, Gru and Dr. Nefario attempt to create robot cookies, so that they can hide in the cookie boxes that Vector will buy, so they can steal the ray. They succeed, and so, Gru tells the girls to go sell cookies to Vector. Unfortunately for Gru, the girls have a dance class, and they refuse to go sell cookies until their class is over. And so, after class, the girls walk over to Vector's lair, and sell him many boxes of cookies. While Vector was counting out bills, the cookie robots travel to where the ray was being kept, open up a passage for Gru and his minions to steal the ray. Sadly, the robots seal up the passage before Gru could escape with the ray, so he had to go out through the front door. He eventually does this, with many VERY close calls of being found out by Vector. On the way back home, the girls pester Gru to go to an amusement park, where Gru and the girls start to form a bond. The girls give Gru a ticket to their dance performance, but Gru finds out that that was the day on which he had planned to steal the moon. Sadly for him, the bank still refuses to provide Gru with the money, and he lost hope. Then, all his minions and the girls get money by selling things and from savings, and so, the finances were secure enough to build the rocket ship without loans.

On the day of the moon heist and the performance, Gru makes a very difficult decision. He flies to the moon, shrinks it, and suddenly realizes that he still has time to make it to the performance. He arrives there, but he was too late. He notices a note from Vector that said that he was taking the girls hostage, and he wanted the moon in return for them. Gru travels to Vector's lair, gives him the moon, but Vector was a cheater, and flew away in his ship. Gru pursues him, and Dr. Nefario arrives with the ship. Dr. Nefario tells Gru that the more mass the object that is shrunk has, the shorter the time it will take for it to grow back. Therefore, the moon will grow back very soon. Meanwhile, in Vector's ship, the moon is already starting to grow, but Vector does not notice. The moon grows much larger, and Vector gets crushed by it. The girls escape from their jail, and they have to take a jump to reach Gru's ship. All three girls make it, and the moon, back to full size, rockets out of the atmosphere into its original place, except this time, Vector is stuck there.

Back home, the girls perform their dance for Gru, his mother, and his minions. Suddenly, the DJ minion starts a new song, and everyone is dancing on the stage. Gru and the three girls step on a platform, which rises into the sky, and the final scene of the movie is Gru, his three new adopted daughters, and their silhouette in the moon's shine.

I give this movie four stars, because I thought the plot was excellent, it was fun to watch, and it was very entertaining, funny, and easy to understand. In a nutshell, I thought it was brilliant.