Trouble with the minions

The villain-turned-to-good – Gru – returns in Despicable Me 2, to give us further evidence that there are no such things as villains, just good people who are misunderstood by us all and deserve a second chance.
Gru, after stealing the Moon and finding that the three adorable children who he tried to use as pawns for his plotting in Despicable Me have wormed their way into his heart, is now fully on the side of good and cuddliness in the sequel.
This time Gru (alias Steve Carell) is recruited, along with his minions, by the Anti-Villain League headed by one Silas Ramsbottom (Steve Coogan). The League sounds a lot like MI5, but with humour and without the treachery, and is faced with a mysterious villain who steals Arctic science bases without a second thought.
Together with science sidekick Dr Neferio (Russell Brand), Gru is the perfect reponse to the problem, but then things start going awry.
He gets a skinny partner Lucy (Kirsten Wiig) and his minions are stolen in order to conduct experiments on them.
All of this information is helpful for adults, who like that sort of thing, but as far as the target audience is concerned (under-10s, of which there were dozens in the cinema) they just want to see minions hitting things, saying ‘bottom’ as many times as possible and making nasty smells with a gun that is called an art gun but with an ‘f’.
And, on the basis that all of the above things happened a lot in this film, all the target audience were very happy indeed, while the adults with them may have just worried a little about one aspect of the film that would have seemed familiar had they seen World War Z earlier in the week.
In that, Brad Pitt battles a host of snarling zombies who eat people after being transformed by an infection. In Despicable Me 2, the playful little minions were transformed by a mystery potion into snarling zombie monsters that apparently eat everything – including people.
Now with every film around at the moment depicting the end of the world in some shape or other, it’s just a bit rich, bringing the old zombie cliché into children’s animation.
Apart from that niggle, the film is great fun, with Gru in his usual grumpy mood, the minions causing mayhem everywhere and the fantasy world they all live in cleverly depicted.
And if it leaves the small ones happy and chuckling, we needn’t to worry about anything else, need we? After all the stories of Hans Christian Andersen and the brothers Grimm are fairly bloodthirsty.