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Despicable Me 4

In Despicable Me 4, Gru, the reformed supervillain, faces a new nemesis named Maxime Le Mal. Mal is bent on revenge after Gru and his minions embarrass and capture him at their school for villains class reunion. Now, Gru’s family, including their mischievous new addition, Gru Jr., must go into the witness protection program in the hopes that the AVL (Anit-Villian League) will be able to stop Mal in time.

Despicable Me 4 Review

The animation is terrific, and the voice actors are worlds better than the material, but what does it matter if the audience doesn’t care about what’s going on? Gru is now a fully realized individual; his children are generally happy and well-adjusted, and everyone’s personal issues have more or less already been dealt with in past films. The only thing left for the series would be to embark on a simple and straightforward action flick with identifiable stakes that challenge its cast of lovable characters and grip audiences.

Unfortunately, easily the weakest entry in the franchise, Despicable Me 4 lacks the focus of the others as much as the heart. Instead of lasering in on a single story, it meanders from one uninspired and disconnected slapstick subplot to the next, waiting to finally kick in its underwhelming main plot until an hour into its hour-and-a-half runtime. By then, there’s too little reason to care.

Young children will likely enjoy the film for its juvenile and obvious gags, but parents who snore may want to nap before watching. Better yet, ditch the kiddos and go watch Thelma.

Despicable Me 4 INAPPROPRIATE ELEMENTS

Dookie

• There’s a pet goat that we see poop on the floor as a gag.

Oh God

• It’s difficult to tell, but Gru may say “oh God” once,

Dial M for Murder

• There is a brief, intense scene in which the villain attempts to murder Gru, and it is not cartoonish in any way.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Keep Looking

• Nothing that I saw.

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Inside Out 2

It’s been a year since Riley and her family relocated to San Francisco from Minnesota, and in that time, she’s made a new life for herself. She has great friends and an even better sense of self. That is, until the Puberty Alarm sounds, and her new life gets turned upside down and inside out (get it).

Inside Out 2 Review

The first Inside Out was a touching story about the interconnectivity of emotions and how each plays an important role in shaping us as we grow. Inside Out 2 is a slightly less touching story about the interconnectivity of emotions and how each plays an important role in shaping us as we grow.

Unlike the previous installment, which mostly centered on the adventures of Joy, Sadness, and eventually the lovable Bing Bong, Inside Out 2 is a little less focused. Suffering a bit from sequelitis, it tries too hard to be more than its predecessor rather than less derivative of it. It’s a bigger and louder variation on a theme that spends much more time on Riley’s exterior story and features a significantly larger cast both inside and outside the 13-year-old.

Remember in the first movie, how there were several instances in which it looked as though Joy and Sadness would be able to MacGuffin their way back to headquarters only to be thwarted by a new obstacle? There was one moment when a vacuum tube leading back home suddenly appeared, but it wasn’t sufficient to carry Joy and Sadness back, so Sadness got left behind. However, the tube ended up failing due to a chain of events set into motion several scenes prior. This thoughtful, organic storytelling made the characters’ hard-fought accomplishments that much sweeter. Sadly, like many sequels, Inside Out 2’s interior story is far less compelling than the original. Joy, Sadness, Anger, and Disgust quickly travel from one set piece to the next, easily overcoming each obstacle in time to more or less convenience themselves to the next one.

Another major shift is that of its tone. IO1 ran the main characters and the audience through a gamut of emotions, tackling a number of universally identifiable themes with a musical-like rhythm that carried both through the film’s highs and lows. Riley is no less sympathetic in this sequel than she was in the first, but with anxiety, both the character voiced by Maya Hawke and the feeling, as the driving emotion for most of its runtime, older audiences end up reliving their own anxiety from similar past experiences while younger viewers cringe at their present reality. The result for moviegoers is nearly an hour and a half of feeling anxious, which many audience members might not find particularly pleasant (at least, not the sane ones).

However, as unpleasant as experiencing these uncomfortable moments once again might be, it’s also what gives the movie its greatest asset: heart/actual nostalgia of real life (as opposed to childhood movie member-berries). Despite its lack of originality, Inside Out 2 is an entertaining and mostly satisfying family pic. The performances are fairly strong, even if the material they are working with is somewhat lacking, and some of the original cast didn’t return. Furthermore, what it gets right, it gets really right, and the emotional payoff should be satisfying enough to leave you in a good place by the time the credits roll.

Inside Out 2 INAPPROPRIATE ELEMENTS

It’s Not For Itty Bitties

• Inside Out 2 is rated PG, and that’s appropriate. While it offers no major infractions like curse words, etc., it is pretty emotionally intense. More than that, though, it’s emotionally over the heads of very young children and doesn’t offer enough silly fun to make up for it. I think they’d just be bored.

Locker Room

• There’s a very brief moment in the high school girl’s locker room in which one teen girl isn’t fully clothed. She’s not naked by any means and not even in her underwear. Instead, she’s in a state of mid-dress with hockey pants and an undershirt on. It’s less about anything being shown than it is that it’s evocative of what was happening in the locker room moments before. Since it wasn’t needed, it should have been omitted.

WOKE ELEMENTS

Restraint? From Disney?

• Nearly all of Riley’s story occurs at a girls’ high school hockey camp, and even though you can practically feel the reins that someone put on the filmmakers, no one is openly gay or gender non-conforming, etc. No flags or other coded messages were secreted away for the casual viewer to notice (I say that because the world is changing so quickly, I may have missed something new or something very, very small).
  • I say that you can practically feel it because all of the veteran high school players act indistinguishably from boys in their brief and infrequent time spent as more than digital extras. Furthermore, all but one of them have butch haircuts. There’s simply nothing feminine about them at all.

I Say, “Di.” You Say “Versity.”

• Even in urban areas, hockey is a sport played almost exclusively by white people, but you wouldn’t know it by watching this movie. Almost none of the team is unambiguously caucasian. Even Riley’s BFFs had their races algorithmically chosen to be as inoffensive (i.e., not white) as possible.

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