Despicable Me 3 Movie Review

Despicable Me 3 (2017)

Buy Despicable Me 3 on Amazon
Written by:  Cinco Paul, Ken Daurio
Directed by: Kyle Balda, Pierre Coffin, Eric Guillon (co-director)
Starring:  Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Trey Parker, Miranda Cosgrove, Pierre Coffin
Rating: PG

My rating is simple, Watch It, It Depends, Skip it. Read my previous movie reviews!

Plot
Gru meets his long-lost charming and more successful twin brother Dru who wants to team up with him for one last criminal heist.

Verdict
As sequels tend to trend, this one is worse than the last.  The plot is bad, lacking clever or comical moments. This doesn't even use the minions to much effect. While the second movie was average, it at least was creatively over the top at times to keep you interest. The third movie abandons all hope of trying to be entertaining. If your goal with this movie is to entertain a child, sure, this will do that. If you are looking for an enjoyable movie, this is not it.
Skip it.

Review 
It's a good thing Gru's twin brother decided to show up, otherwise this movie wouldn't have a plot. The twin brother is used to tease us that Gru might return to being a villain. It's a clumsy method to provide a temptation. Having Gru lose his job could have been developed as temptation enough, but this movie tries and fails to be more interesting with a twin brother.

Despicable Me 2 (2013) traded in the unique story of the first, a villain as a protagonist, for something more traditional and boring (read my review). The third throws a properties in the blender with the hopes to coast off of nothing much. This is part Herb Simpson from The Simpsons (1989-) and part The Incredibles (2004) adding nothing at all new or mildly interesting.

This throws in a child star turned villain with a long lost brother plot. The minions have their own unrelated sub-plot and Gru's wife Lucy attempts to emotionally manipulate the audience as she's accepted as a mother to Gru's kids.

I imagine the writers took their various ideas for a third movie and combined what they had, no longer wishing to spend anymore time on a script, figuring if they combined what they had they could squeeze ninety minutes from it.

This movie would have been better served to have Gru lose his job, and everything else, forcing him to become a villain again to regain what he lost. The problem is that this movie can coast on it's name alone. It doesn't have to offer a good hook like the first movie.
While it's marginally better than Minions (2015) (read my review), that's not saying much. Kids movies don't have to be mind numbing, The LEGO Batman Movie (2017) (read my review) and Inside Out (2015) (read my review) prove that.