MOVIE REVIEW: “Despicable Me” just okay

"DESPICABLE ME"

Grade: B 

Cast: Voices of Steve Carell, Jason Segel, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier, Elsie Fisher, Russell Brand, Kristen Wiig, Julie Andrews

Directors: Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud

Theaters: Hollywood, Tinseltown, Carmike, Chapel Hills, Cinemark

Rated: PG (for rude humor and mild action)

Running time: 1 hour, 35 minutes

If “Despicable Me” were a Pixar film, it would be a tremendous disappointment. But from Universal, it’s fine.

While that hardly sounds like a ringing endorsement, “Despicable Me” is a perfectly enjoyable film, and most younger children will love it.

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.

The world’s most megalomaniacal criminal, Gru is resting on his laurels and needs something to jump start 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 “How the Grinch Stole Christmas” with advanced technology. 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, 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 Gru and Vector. Even the great Julie Andrews, who plays Gru’s shrew of a mother, would be mostly forgettable were it not for the fact that she is playing so against type. In a series of flashbacks, we see that 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 nonPixar-animated films such as this year’s “How to Train Your Dragon” or last year’s “Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs,” but is 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 change (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.