DESPICABLE ME 3
Directors: Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda
Cert: U. 90mins
Like its predecessors, Despicable Me 3 is a ridiculous, highly entertaining cartoon, yet it also gives its characters the opportunity to learn and grow. It explores – in a very silly way – the inner struggle between good and evil, as well as the issue of dealing with failure.
Its sense of humour is sometimes immature, but the cartoonish tone clearly indicates that it’s not to be taken too seriously.
Former supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) and his wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) work for the Anti-Villain League, while also raising their three adopted daughters. When they're fired for failing to stop a supervillain (from stealing the world’s largest diamond), the yellow Minions quit working for Gru because he’s not on board with their enthusiasm for going back to villainy.
Twin brother
Gru struggles with feeling like he has failed when he discovers that he has a rich twin brother Dru (also Steve Carell) with much more hair, who makes Gru feel even more insufficient. We then find out that Dru feels similarly, having always disappointed their late father. Dru tries to persuade Gru back into the family business of supervillainy, which leads to various misadventures where they alternately squabble and bond.
Meanwhile, Lucy (who was a great agent, but is new to parenting) tries to figure out how to be a good mother, their daughter Agnes goes on a wide-eyed quest to find a unicorn, and the Minions (despite having rebelled against him) ultimately return to Gru, their true master.
The antagonist of the film, Balthazar Bratt (Trey Parker), is a former TV star whose show was cancelled in the 1980s, and he’s now stuck there – defined both by the 1980s as an era, and also by his rejection at the hands of others.
This mirrors Gru’s challenges as he tries to cope with failure, but Gru ultimately deals with it in a healthier and more redemptive way. Perhaps he listened to Lucy’s advice after they got fired: ‘I loved being an agent. But there are other things I love more.’ She’s referring to Gru and their adoptive family. We can take this as a reminder that, whatever happens in life, as Christians our identity is in Christ. We've been adopted by God the Father, and that doesn’t change. So failure, or anything that feels like it, doesn’t have to define us.
