Megamind (2010)
Directed by Tom McGrath
After Megamind, a highly intelligent alien supervillain, defeats his long-time nemesis Metro Man, Megamind creates a new hero to fight, but must act to save the city when his "creation" becomes an even worse villain than he was.
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For fans of the Richard Donner "Superman" movies, there's even a hammy Brando-inflected turn by Ferrell as Metro Man's white-haired Space Dad.
The story has fun with the origins of “Superman” as a baby Megamind ( Will Ferrell ) and another infant are jettisoned from their soon-to-be-destroyed planet.
I liked the idea a lot: A riff on the Superman origin, with another baby that arrived on earth at the same time but turned out to be a super-villain.
The opening act details the history of Megamind and Metroman, life-long nemeses sent to Earth in a sequence that clearly parodies the opening act of “Superman.”
Tina Fey as Roxanne Ritchi: She’s our Lois Lane just like Metroman and Megamind are hybrids of Superman.
His comical homage to Marlon Brando as Jor-El from 1978's Superman is a hoot, and his garbled pronunciation of school and Metro City are reminiscent of Ferrell's goofy riff on San Diego in Anchorman.
There are a few similarities to last summer’s funnier and sweeter “Despicable Me,” and even more ideas teased out of “The Incredibles.”
Toss in a little of "The Incredibles" and you have an OK entertainment that's instantly forgettable.
Unlike Pixar’s vastly superior The Incredibles , which affirmed the heroic archetype even as it cross-examined it, Megamind suggests that sometimes the hero isn’t really a hero at all.
If you crossed The Incredibles with Despicable Me , you'd end up with something a lot like DreamWorks Animation's new 3D toon Megamind .
MEGAMIND wants to be the DreamWorks Animation version of Pixar’s “The Incredibles.”
Had them both in the far-better “The Incredibles.”
This animated film from the DreamWorks stable (Shrek, How to Train Your Dragon) is not as funny as Despicable Me and not even in the same intergalactic solar system as The Incredibles.
The incipient promise of Dragon was given a savage beating by Shrek Forever After , but that was to be expected from a Shrek picture; it's only now that the corpse of the very short DreamWorks Renaissance has been officially embalmed with Megamind , the rare kind of motion picture which not only puts all of its funniest stuff in the trailer, but in which that same funny stuff is actually less successful, given its proper context.
And children's films lately have been playing to that notion by centering on figures usually typecast as bad guys — a rat in Ratatouille, an ogre in Shrek, a criminal mastermind in Despicable Me.
"Megamind," though, is by no means a knockoff, and if you get past the eerie coincidences (characters named Minion, the lead's mangled diction), you see that it stakes out different territory, playing around with superhero mythology (especially Superman) in much the same way as "Shrek" poked fun at fairytales.
Luckily, kids have short memories, but it's still no sure bet they'll respond to the latest animated entry in the post-ironic Shrek vein.
Will Ferrell doesn't simply lend a recognizable voice to Megamind, he creates a complete character, just as Mike Myers did in Shrek and Tom Hanks did as Woody in Toy Story.
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Probably the cleverest thing about the movie is having Megamind’s minion—named Minion (David Cross)—designed after the infamous Ro-Man from the grade Z cult classic Robot Monster (1953).
The look of Minion—a robot/gorilla body with a fishbowl head—may be an obvious homage to the title character of the 1953 grade-Z 3D movie Robot Monster, but horrid Hal Stewart apparently takes his name from the first two modern-day Green Lanterns: Hal Jordan and John Stewart.
That is, the most famous voice talent that money, and the cachet of Dreamworks animation honcho Jeffrey Katzenberg, can buy, e.g., Will Ferrell as the title not-quite villain, Brad Pitt as his fatuous comic-bookish hero opposite number Metro Man, Tina Fey as a kind of post-modern, " His Girl Friday "-inflected Lois Lane type, Jonah Hill as her schluby, not-very-nice-inside cameraman who is unwittingly given superpowers, with ill result, and David Cross as Megamind's hench-thing -- one of the movie's most inspired creations, as it happens: a super-smart fish in a water-filled dome screwed atop an ape body, an homage of sorts to the anti-classic sci-fi cheesefest " Robot Monster ."
Then again, so does the movie itself, with a story that one can easily envision as coming from 1989 (there are definite echoes of "Ghostbusters II" in its finale).
The movie's visual wit is evident in its salutes to the likes of Fritz Lang's Metropolis and Rube Goldberg's famously complicated contraptions.
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Roxanne Ritchi (voice of Tina Fey) is a TV news reporter whose cameraman Bernard (voice of Jonah Hill) has a serious crush (a device overused already in "Scream" and as recently as "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs").
Roxanne also could have afforded to be a little softer as a heroine, sort of like Anna Faris' lovable reporter from 2009's wonderful " Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs ;" for a woman who claims that you "shouldn't judge a person from what's on the outside," she comes off as hypocritical in the way she's always shrugging off nerdy Hal's initially harmless, sincere advances.
Sony Pictures Animation put out Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs earlier this year, in 3D – the story of a brilliant inventor with no social skills who made a gizmo that turned weather into food.
Further, news reporter Roxanne is borrowed from the spunky weather girl of Sony's Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs.
Now, with Tom McGrath ("Madagascar") at the helm of "Megamind," it's back to the same old Shrek -- er, dreck.
Director Tom McGrath (the "Madagascar" animations) does a nice job with the overworked 3D format in "Megamind," where you may experience vertigo, but the freshman screenwriting team of Alan J. Schoolcraft & Brent Simons have come up with a story that plays like "Despicable Me" with the restorative little girls replaced with a love interest.
Director Tom McGrath has previous sharpened his skills making both films in the Madagascar franchise, and if you enjoyed those then Megamind will do the trick for you.
The director of the blockbuster “Madagascar” films, Tom McGrath (who also voices one of the franchise’s penguin characters) heads in a slightly less frantic direction with “Megamind,” but his timing couldn’t be worse.
Director Tom McGrath, who worked on the furiously antic Ren & Stimpy Show before helming the Madagascar hits, opens Megamind with its titular (anti-)hero's narration, as we watch the blue-skinned brainiac with the billboard-size forehead plummeting to his death.
In much the same way that director Tom McGrath showed us that the relationships between, oddly enough, zoo animals can work as a metaphor for the joys and civil benefits of modern urban living in Madagascar , this weirdly wonderful movie zeroes in on the political puppet show of superhero stories and lays it bare in a way that suggests that, ahem, truth, justice, and the American way are, well, just a slogan.