Movie Reviews: Despicable Me 2, World War Z

Despicable Me 2 (2013)

When the first Despicable Me was met with both critical and commercial success, everyone knew that a sequel was inevitable. The trouble is that, in the first one, we had a clear anti-hero in Gru… but now he’s a good guy. How does that work?

In the second movie, he gets enlisted by the Anti-Villain League to fight an unknown villain. He partners up with the quirky Lucy Wilde, played by Kristen Wiig, and we follow along on a very thin plot involving a suburban mall, a Mexican restaurant, and one of the little girls growing up and starting to like boys. No, it’s not “it’s so fluffy” Agnes, thankfully. Yes, the story itself is on the weak side, but we are treated to a lot of laughs. It seems like they went through some focus testing and found people liked the minions, so they put more minions. It does feel heavy-handed at times, but even after the 98 minute runtime, I wanted more minions. Go figure.

They do housework, they have Irish drinking parties, they play golf, and they sing YMCA in full costume. Even though I’m giving Despicable Me 2 the same 3.5 star rating that I gave Monsters University, I’d argue that it is a better, funnier and ultimately more enjoyable movie. And it’s really all because of the stupidly amusing minions.

World War Z (2013)

Between the Walking Dead, Resident Evil, 28 Days Later, Zombieland and countless others, it’s becoming incredibly clear that we have a huge fascination with the undead. The thing is–unlike vampires, werewolves, giant robots and evil space aliens–there hasn’t been much in terms of a massive Hollywood budget take on zombies. World War Z changes that in a big way.

What happens, though, is that World War Z takes everything that we think we know about the undead and turns it on its decaying head. The zombies in World War Z don’t “turn” over the course of a few days; they do it in a matter of seconds. They’re not slow and lumbering; they’re remarkably fast and agile. And yes, while they still move around with what seems like a horde mentality, they have a habit of piling on top of one another in what almost looks like a concerted effort to get at the fresh flesh of the living. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, but it isn’t what we normally expect from the zombie apocalypse.

The real problem is that we are ultimately presented with a series of events that are barely held together by the thinnest of strings, throwing us from Philadelphia to a naval vessel, from South Korea to Israel. It comes off as remarkably thin and the only character that shows any semblance of development is Brad Pitt’s. Everyone else almost doesn’t matter and, even at the end, we don’t get any sort of satisfying resolution.

You can tell that Hollywood wants to build a series of sequels and/or prequels out of this franchise and, to be honest, I can’t really blame them. We love our zombies, even if they turn in 12 seconds and run faster than rabid Black Friday shoppers.