Despicable Me 4

It's more of the same. I'm not sure if anything else matters, that's what Despicable Me 4 gives you. Sufficiently episodic that it's actually hard to credit that it has a 'through' line, it's a further outing for a franchise whose cross-promotional assets vary from construction toys to broadband provision. Various cast members return, joined by Will Ferrell and Sofia Vergara, only one of whom is recognisable. The minions too, with the addition of some super-powered ones that offer exciting opportunities in merchandise. Not storytelling, to be clear, or any significant improvement on humour pitched at the level of 'falling over' or 'silly words.

Minionish, as voiced by Pierre Coffin, includes the usual banana babble and a heroic leap accompanied by a yell of 'suppository' was enough to raise a small chuckle but I am not the target audience and if one was one would be underserved. I shan't try to start listing family movie sequels that are based upon taking established characters into new communities under the guise of witness protection or eviction or some other convenient inconvenience. A fish out of water would smell as sweet by any other name.

There is a script, penned by Mike Wright (School Of Rock and The Emoji Movie) and Ken Duario (Despicables Me 1, 2 and so on). Directors Chris Renaud and Patrick Delage have extensive animation experience, though this film is Delage's first time in the big chair for a feature. With so many character assets and models already established it's already hard enough to determine who made what decisions without four (or more) creative voices in the big credits. It's even harder to determine if this is best regarded as a series of interlocking episodes rather than a single narrative.

There's concern about lying for one of the girls, trapped in a permanent childhood though we do learn Gru was in Lycee Pas Bon's class of (19)86. The franchise has often struggled with chronologies, ignoring the modified origin story for the Minions it's not an accident they vanished into hibernation between Napoleon and Nixon. That the minions come back in 1968 means it's a year after Lite-Brite is introduced, a plastic toy that's central to the Illumination branding and introduction. That level of historical reference is matched by musical cues that now seem aimed at grandparents, as repeated use of Culture Club's Karma Chameleon and not one but two second-order impersonations of Boy George. That tune, however catchy, is now 40 and change. As such it's about as timely as a neon sign in the background for Deckard Inc, but Blade Runner has at least seen frequent re-releases. A reference to Took's Lodge is undoubtedly a nod to The Lord Of The Rings but one suspects that the peregrination had less to do with Peter Jackson than with presence of super-fan Stephen Colbert among the voices.

I was entertained by the country-club sequence where Gru's tennis game was assisted in an unexpected way by his minions. Would I have preferred it as a three minute short before something else? Probably. Will that segment be watched by more folk as a burst between walking into a room to hand over a juicebox or check on a child in thrall to a rectangular babysitter? Almost certainly. Will anyone stay to watch all of the credits if there's no scene at the end? Definitely not. I wonder, talking about short bursts, if the repeated use of 'pomodoro' in minionish is a reference to the productivity technique that's based on five minute stretches. I don't think any story element persists for longer than that before we move onto something new.

The unaging children mean that teenage rebellion has to come from somewhere else, Joey King's already extensive career could probably have done without an outing that could have been resolved by a letter of recommendation but there'd have been no near-obligatory heist/jailbreak segment without it. A sequence based on a dance-based arcade rhythm action game did leave me worrying that there weren't going to be any cultural references in this I didn't get. It similarly left me worrying that apart from the physical comedy everything else was going to be drawn by the dead hand of the 1980s, as if the cultural ennui of Ready Player One wasn't prescient enough.

I'm not being entirely fair. It does in places stretch to the early Nineties, with nods to Pulp Fiction and Mission: Impossible. One of the super-powered minions does something that's lifted from Spider-Man 2, which is as recent as 2004. There's also a direct reference to "Honey Badger don't care" which is from 2011. Admittedly, with the first film of the franchise coming out in 2010 there's a non-zero chance that weans who were taken to the first one are taking their own offspring to see this. A recursive element in superhero films is echoed in the mega-minions, with powers borrowed from The Thing and Mr Fantastic, (Fantastic Four), Colossus and Cyclops (X-Men) and maybe Superman albeit with a pointy head.

The closing number is Tears For Fears' Everybody Wants To Rule The World, and there is a bit of a novelty in it being delivered by a chorus of supervillains. There's plenty else new under the sun, but I wouldn't worry too much about looking for it here. Which is, I think, the point. This is good enough, which is quite distinct from good.