Ah yes, summer…home of fluff movies that really don’t have a lot of impact but still do well at the box office and at least manage to entertain for ninety minutes or so.  And today we get a movie that’s got summer written all over it, Despicable Me, a movie that proves to be fun, but not exactly a brilliant cinematic move.

Despicable Me follows Gru, supervillain extraordinaire, whose career in villainy has seen better days.  His most recent heists involve stealing Times Square’s Jumbotron and a couple of major monument…replicas…from Las Vegas.  But Gru’s getting older.  His devices aren’t as horrifying as those of his younger, hungrier counterparts, and he’s facing competition.  Competition like Vector, a Bill Gates-esque figure whose oeuvre tends to focus on a combination of mad science and fish.  And as Gru sets out to achieve his life’s dream, the theft of the moon, he discovers that the road to this success requires him to find some unlikely allies in the form of three little orphan girls who will change his life forever.

See what I mean?  Straightforward.  REALLY straightforward.  He’ll grow, he’ll change, he’ll have some laughs, he’ll be a better person by the end.  Despicable Me follows the same flow chart that any of a hundred other movies have followed to moderate success over the last three decades.

But that doesn’t really diminish the movie any.  Despicable Me carries plenty of laughs from every quarter.  There are of course the straight laughs, like the newly-developed “fart gun”, a result of Gru’s elderly mad scientist assistant mishearing Gru’s instructions. But there are also more sophisticated laughs that the kiddies will miss but the grownups who took the kiddies will laugh at, like the origin of the Bank of Evil, a central player in the plans of supervillains the world over (not everyone is Lex Luthor, you know!  Even a supervillain needs a loan from time to time.) that will definitely raise some knowing chuckles from the adults.

The clearest success of Despicable Me is in its barely-translatable horde of Minions, those tiny little yellow guys you’ve seen in commercials literally everywhere.  The closest basis for comparison is with the Rabbids from the Rayman series, a bunch of incoherent, happy little drones with occasional bursts of violence.  The Minions are a bit happier and more focused than the Rabbids, but it’s the same general idea.

And while Gru follows a path that many, MANY, before him have followed, he’ll do so with plenty of style and lots of laughs, making it almost too easy for the Screenhead Ten Scale to hand over an eight out of ten.  It’s one thing to make a movie based on a tired premise.  It’s another thing entirely to do a really good job at it.