Movie Review: Despicable Me

Early Saturday morning I went to see an advanced screening of the Film Despicable Me with my 13-year-old daughter Kaia, my BFF Mike and his lovely wife Trish.

Although I've never attended a movie screening at 10:00am before, I can say it was a fun but strange experience, there were a lot of families there with little kids, no introduction from anyone (usually there is a radio station sponsoring the screening so someone gets up and talks before the movie starts), and afterwords no one asked us for feedback.

The movie itself was a lot of fun and we all left the theatre talking about how great the film was. What I noticed about Mike's comments was that they focused on things like the great animation and story and totally avoided the best thing in the entire film.

One Word: Vector (pictured below)

Vector (voiced amazingly well by Jason Segel, who I've been following since Freaks & Geeks), dressed in a striking orange warm-up suit and using vast amounts of weapons and traps is clearly the superior super villain in the film. From his first appearance (wherein he excitedly shows the "main" character Gru a fascinating weapon) to the cleverness of his name (a vector has both a magnitude and a direction - excellent qualities for a super villain), Vector himself is the young turk of the film, out villain-ing Gru every step of the way while still being portrayed human enough that we can see his love of a good coconutty cookie.

In my humble (but often correct) opinion, a film is only as great as it's villains and this movie defintely features a great one.