Despicable Me...gamind (Megamind Review)

There are certain advantages to going and seeing a lesser movie while the blockbuster of the year is enjoying its opening weekend.  While everyone and their mother (including mine) went out to see Harry Potter 7.1, I snuck quietly past the lines of wand-waving, faux-Latin-screaming children in a way that felt downright criminal and found myself sitting happily with a small crowd inside the building's only theater not designated to a nearly-three-hour tour of England to watch Megamind, the latest from Dreamworks' animation studios.  I'll be honest with you: I wasn't really looking forward to watching Megamind.  In fact, had I not previewed it back in May or whenever the hell that was and made the rash decision to try my darndest to see each and every movie on said list, I don't think I would be seeing it now.  I am happy to report, then, that it exceeded my expectations and in fact is one of the better animated films of this year.

Megamind's biggest flaw is that it came out in the same year as Despicable Me, 2010's other bad-guy-turns-good-animated-film-starring-one-of-Channel 4's-newsteam-from-Anchorman, and a mere two weeks before Harry Potter and the Abandonment of Hogwarts.  Despicable Me and Megamind will naturally draw comparisons to each other, much as A Bug's Life and Antz did oh so long ago or when an excess of disaster movies (most notably Independence Day in 1996, Dante's Peak and Volcano, both of 1997, and Armageddon and Deep Impact in 1998) seemed to follow one after another with a reckless abandon that suggested Hollywood's takeover by overly-hopeful end-times fanatics.  Megamind and Despicable Me do share the same basic shell of a plot: evil mastermind slowly but surely turns to the path of goodness in order to save the day.  Gru of Despicable Me has a heavy foreign accent; Megamind of... Megamind... is from another planet entirely.  Gru has hundreds of pint-sized yellow minions that squeak and mumble in gibberish; Megamind has hundreds of pint-sized flying "brainbots" that beep and whistle in gibberish.  Gru's main henchman is an old scientist voiced by Russell Brand; Megamind's main henchman is a fish in a robot suit voiced by David Cross.

From there, though, the similarities largely end.  If you go through and watch all of Megamind's trailers, about 95% of what you see happens in the first 20 minutes.  The film is kicked off nicely by a shot of Megamind himself falling to his death and thus giving him the excuse to essentially narrate his "life flashing before his eyes" that will, by the end of the movie, lead right back to him falling from hundreds of stories up.  He describes his Superman-style childhood (the idea for the film DID come from the question "What if Lex Luthor beat Superman?"), where his parents tell him he's "destined for ----" (his capsule shuts before he hears the rest).  At the same time, another child from the same system is sent to Earth along with him: Metro Man.  They crashland on Earth - Metro Man sliding through the front doors of a mansion, Megamind plopping down in the exercise yard of a "prison for the gifted" (run, I would imagine, by a bald guy in a wheelchair) - and their lives clash and intersect constantly from there.  Megamind turns to evil not so much because he himself is evil but because circumstances turn him towards it.  His main purpose is to serve as the evil foil to Metro Man's good.  This quick summation of their history together leads straight to the film's catalyst sequence in which Megamind traps Metro Man and blows the superhero to smithereens with a death ray.  The bad guy wins.  Megamind takes over the city and runs rampant through the streets.

And suddenly, Megamind finds he has no purpose.

I won't spoil any more for you (though everything I just said basically IS the trailer), but from here on out, the film takes some great twists and turns that, while you can pretty much guess the end result, keeps you highly entertained and even manages to throw some morals at you that were really quite touching.  Will Ferrel is one of those actors that I simply cannot figure out: in short bursts (like trailers), he can be pretty annoying, and yet I enjoy most of the films in which he stars.  He was certainly the best part of The Other Guys, and Elf, and he would have done the same for Anchorman had Steve Carell never been born.  There are just little things that Ferrel does, little inflections in his voice, or (for live-action films) facial expressions that he slips in, that just work, and it's the same for Megamind, like a running gag in which Megamind constantly mispronounces the city's name (rather than call it "Metro City", he blends the two words into one that rhymes with "velocity").  Let me clarify by saying that this film is anything but gutbustingly funny the whole way through; instead, it's a solid family adventure with clever writing worthy of the titular character's name.  The action sequences had me on the edge of my seat staring wide-eyed just as the trio of small children in the row in front of me (thank you, Gullermo Del Toro, who apparently offered his artistic services for making the action more exciting), and Megamind himself made for an engaging, sympathetic character that I don't feel is too often seen in any film nowadays.  He has a depth to him that I was not expecting, and his growth - not the action scenes, not the humor - was the true highlight of the film.

So go out and give Megamind a shot.  The competition for its main demographic will be spending the next several weeks utterly dominating the box office, so if you want to avoid the ridiculous lines awaiting you at any and all Harry Potter showings, go see this instead, but try to find it in 2D.  My theater was only showing in 3D, and I am dead certain that some scenes - the action scenes at that! - weren't even IN 3D.  Total waste of the extra $3.  I could have used that money to buy a small popcorn, or a single Reece's cup, or about half a fountain drink.  Sheesh.