
Despicable Me 2: The original Despicable Me is one of those movies I had no major beef with until people started treating it like an inventive cartoon that could stand with the best or even the middlest of Pixar; it’s basically a middle-of-the-pack DreamWorks movie without that company’s house animation style (if you’re interested in this story with said style, Megamind is pretty much it). Steve Carell’s Eastern Europe-accented Gru is amusing, as are his chattery (and very Pixar-y) yellow pill-like minions, but I can’t imagine the story has much more to offer in a second go-round (though the Toy Story sequels are superb and I liked Monsters University, animated sequels are beginning to seem almost as dodgy as comedy sequels). Nonetheless, this movie is going to make bank-and-a-half this weekend; I don’t know if Bruckheimer, Disney, or whoever made the release-date call on Lone Ranger really understood that when they placed their movie in direct competition.