Despicable Me

Impressions before seeing it
I liked the concept, and opinions were generally positive, so I was hoping for a cute, fun family movie.

How was it?
What bothered me about Despicable Me is that it felt like more of a kid's movie than a family movie. It tries really, really hard to stuff in a lot of jokes and be a comedy, but most of those jokes were of the very simple slapstick variety. In other words, child humour. That's fine if it's your sense of humour, but I have always found slapstick to be better in small doses, and I prefer jokes that require some thought. This movie doesn't have any of that for the grown-ups. Also, not all of it is original: I was especially rolling my eyes at the "guy who wants to prove he is a good parent by not missing his kid's ballet practice" story, which is done in almost every movie that has a deadbeat parent in it (had the kids been boys, it surely would've been baseball practice).

What I did like about it was some of the designs, like the supervillain vehicles of both Gru (Steve Carell) and Vector (Jason Segel), and the overall look of everything. As expected, the animation looks amazing on Blu-ray. In other words, my positive thoughts about this movie are mostly superficial. It's kind of cute and entertaining, but not as much as it could have been, and the repetitive physical humour was distracting me from the story. It's a shame, because the concept had a lot of potential (Pixar would have done it so much better), but instead of making it more accessible they just wanted to please the kids, and only the kids.

Recommendation
If you get to see it on Blu-ray, it might be more enjoyable just to watch it with the sound down and dub in your own dialogue. Or if you have a very simple sense of humour and/or are six years old, you'll probably like it the way it is.