Despicable Me 3 (2017)
Directed by Kyle Balda
Gru and his wife Lucy must stop former '80s child star Balthazar Bratt from achieving world domination.
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3 films that influenced Despicable Me 3
What critics say influenced Despicable Me 3
Apart from those little pokey yellow things, the character designs remain stiff and ugly, randomly pieced together from a junk drawer full of spindly legs, barrel torsos, and huge schnozzes; although Despicable Me 3 spares younger viewers the sight of Dr. Nefario, the Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 supporting character who looked like he was imported from the Harkonen home world in David Lynch’s Dune , it does add what appears to be a grotesque, ballooning caricature of Gerard Depardieu, as well as the sight of the Bosc-pear-inspired Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan) being unceremoniously excreted down a small aperture by his toucan-faced successor at the Anti-Villain League, Valerie Da Vinci (Jenny Slate).
A base example of this is the presence of the cartoonishly-ugly new head of the Anti-Villain league (voiced by Jenny Slate), whose presence is limited to just one scene where she berates and fires Gru and Lucy, but even its idea of an Easter egg just reads as nasty (in the opening scene, Gru callously and clearly kills a Finding Nemo-esque clown fish with his submarine).
It’s a joke, and a meta movie reference to the competing studio Pixar’s Finding Nemo franchise (Nemo is a clownfish with a tiny malformed fin).
More irksome, they’re at the centre of a joke that takes aim at Finding Nemo — a glib bit of homage that only illustrates how far out of Pixar’s class Gru and his crew are.
Most disappointing (and disturbing) is a brief scene that, in what has to be seen as a shameful effort to bait "Finding Nemo" studio Pixar into an on-screen "war," seems to show a clownfish's fins being unceremoniously sheared off by a Minion-controlled rocket.
There are plenty of other outlandish jokes here, such as a French character that's a spitting image of Gerard Depardieu, a rather outré depiction of a fictional European island (whose inhabitants include lots of cheese-eating kids, a bunch of drunks and a somewhat offensively rendered woman with major facial hair) and, in what may be the film’s piece de resistance, two laugh-out-loud Minion sketches: one that may be a direct reference to the song-and-dance number in Charlie Chaplin’s Modern Times, and a prison sequence scored to Pharrell’s hit “Freedom.”