This review first appeared in The Colorado Springs Gazette. To read this review at its original source, click here.

Despicable Me is the sort of movie about which it is the most difficult to write. It is not a bad film by any stretch of the imagination. On the other hand, it didn’t set my heart racing either. It is a sort of lukewarm winner, neither terrific nor terrible. While that hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement, Despicable Me is a perfectly enjoyable film, and this critic’s quandary is one that your children will easily overlook.

Gru (voiced with clownish Slavic aplomb by Steve Carell) is the sort of Blofeldesque super villain who would not look out of place in an old James Bond movie. Beneath his imposing yet ordinary looking house (set menacingly on a suburban block of white picket fences) is a cavernous evil lair teeming with minions who do their master’s bidding. Once the world’s most megalomaniacal criminal, Gru is resting on his laurels and needs something to jumpstart his malevolent career. His latest plan is his most diabolical yet—steal the moon. Yes, that moon.

To accomplish this impossible heist, Gru will need to get his hands on a shrink ray. Unfortunately, his arch-nemesis (think Mad magazine’s classic “Spy vs. Spy” strip), the tracksuit-wearing Vector (voiced by Jason Segel), gets to the shrink ray first, forcing Gru to employ drastic measures. Aware of Vector’s penchant for sweets, Gru adopts a trio of door-to-door cookie selling orphan girls—Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), Edith (Dana Gaier) and Agnes (Elsie Fisher)—to enable him to infiltrate his rival’s lair. But what Gru doesn’t realize is that the tiny trio is far more formidable than any ray gun-toting adversary.

Despicable Me is The Grinch Who Stole Christmas with advanced technology. And like the Grinch, the filmmakers behind this film knew that their villain would be the delicious center of attention and thus their camera rarely leaves him. (When it does, it’s usually to linger on one or more of Gru’s yellow, pill-shaped, overalls-clad minions who, while the movie never confirms it, I read somewhere are genetically enhanced corn puffs. The minions are there to look and sound cute and they do their job admirably.)

The voice talents of some of the lesser cast members are mostly wasted. Why cast Russell Brand as Gru’s elderly accomplice if you’re not going to let his personality out even a little bit? Kristen Wiig is given little to do as Miss Hattie, the orphanage director who, it must be said, easily manages to take the title of Most Evil Villain away from both Gru and Vector. Even the great Julie Andrews, who plays Gru’s shrew of a mother, is mostly forgettable were it not for the fact that she is playing so against type. In a series of flashbacks, we see Gru isn’t so much evil as he is dogged by long-standing mommy issues—when a young Gru, decked out in a cardboard spacesuit tells his mother that someday he’s going to the moon, she tells him it’s too late: “They stopped sending monkeys long ago.”

The narrative, efficient and well-choreographed, still lacks the wit and zest of other non-Pixar animated films such as this year’s How to Train Your Dragon or last year’s Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs, but is actually surprisingly moving at times, borrowing an emotional page from Pixar, if not their overall heft and substantive weight. It is far superior to other recent animated offerings, such as Monsters vs. Aliens, and actually utilizes its 3-D technology in a delightful way that won’t have you regretting the upcharge (the film makes the most of its technology and delivers the majority of its jokes visually).

While Despicable Me has plenty to recommend it to kids (there’s even a joke or two for mom and dad—when Gru attempts to get a loan from the Bank of Evil, we notice a codicil just beneath the heading: “Formerly Lehman Brothers), the result is agreeable and diverting, if ultimately forgettable.

© Copyright 2010 Brandon Fibbs. All rights reserved.

Directed by Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud
Starring: Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Elsie Fisher, Russell Brand, Kristen Wiig, Julie Andrews
Rated PG for rude humor and mild action.
Running Time: 95 minutes