Despicable Me 4

ADHD slapstick simulation with decent references to other, better movies for the mature viewers forced into the audience. It'll keep kids entertained, but there's nothing in the way of an added layer of depth or emotion to latch onto and elevate this past the animated whizbang fodder that it is. It's fine, aggressively fine, an overstimulating colourful collage of loud slapstickery with the most threadbare of plots to tie it all together.

Watched this with my niece and nephews without being caught up on the rest of the series. In fact, I couldn't have told you beforehand which ones I had seen, but if my watch history is to be trusted, I've only seen the first. Luckily, other than some initial confusion about Gru's affiliation with the AVL, I didn't feel like I was missing anything critical. I went in with basically no expectations and was pleasantly surprised. Unlike Inside Out 2, which I saw last week, there's no real ambition to tell a powerful/poignant story with this one - it's a low brow kids movie through and though. But it's very watchable, with an appropriately brief runtime and some physical/gag-based humor that even worked on a jaded adult like me (the minions doing baby care like a racing pit stop definitely got a chuckle). As far as criticisms go, the kids' plot line felt short changed and the epilogue song/dance party definitely lost me.