Review of Despicable Me (2010) by Shiira — 23 Aug 2010

A turbaned man, a Muslim in Egypt, is nearly killed by a van carrying American tourists; ugly Americans, made so by the film's use of Lynyrd Skynard's "Sweet Home Alabama" blaring over the soundtrack, signifying impropriety.

And sure enough, the tourists emerge from the van like they own the place, decked out in garish excursionist regalia, oblivious to their display of cultural insensitivity. Right away, "Despicable Me" establishes the American character as being hardly heroic, despicable even, conveyed through the southern family's non-concern for the Muslim pedestrian.

When the young boy falls from the pyramid's scaffolding, he falls without any interference from a superhero, because there is no such thing as a superhero(read: Americans and Muslims alike are despicable).

This satirical, and boldly subversive opening, demonstrates how the film views America as being the lesser of two evils in every global conflict. America is the more congenial villain. The boy falls; the boy bounces, off from the fake pyramid, perhaps, a metaphor for the fake war, initiated by the despicable against the relatively despicable.

The world of "Despicable Me" is a dystopian one, and this opening scene establishes this dystopia, by going against the grain of how America sees itself, as heroes, because there's an expectation level on the moviegoer's part that some man from the sky will swoop down from the heavens and save the boy before he hits the ground.

But alas, "Despicable Me" is not that movie. There's only villains, like Dru(Steve Carrell), an aging evil mastermind, engaged in a race to steal the moon with Vector(Seth Rogen), an upstart scoundrel who wants to just like Dru.

This anti-NASA notion is a contest that could easily be construed as a parody of America's fight with the Soviet Union to conquer space during the Cold War. ("Victor", Vector's "nerd name", incidentally, is the NATO name for a class of nuclear-powered Soviet attack submarines.

) When Dru deploys his shrink ray at the lunar sphere, he becomes an evil Neil Armstrong of sorts: the first man to walk all over the moon. He represents the America that other countries make us out to be, a tyrannical America.

But Dru has a sentimental streak, a conflicted man who believes in family values, and saves the world, even though nobody asked him to save the world in the first place, as the cause of the dilemma was of his own making.

Depending on who you are, Dru's actions, taken in its entirety, makes him either a hero, an anti-hero, or a villain.