Despicable Me 3 arrived in 2017 as the fourth film in Illumination’s Minions machine and the third to carry the Despicable Me name. Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda directed. Cinco Paul and Ken Daurio wrote it. It runs 90 minutes. It is an action-animation-comedy-family-adventure, which is a lot of genres for a movie that mostly wants to sell you a yellow pill with goggles.
The published critical score sits at 4.9 out of 10, a Metacritic aggregate of 49 out of 100. That number is the right one. Despicable Me 3 is not a disaster. It is a shrug, and a shrug from a franchise that once had real slapstick invention is its own kind of failure.
Trailer, via Illumination.
Key facts
- Title: Despicable Me 3
- Year: 2017
- Directors: Pierre Coffin, Kyle Balda
- Writers: Ken Daurio, Cinco Paul
- Runtime: 90 minutes
- Tagline: “Oh brother.”
- Cast: Steve Carell, Kristen Wiig, Trey Parker, Miranda Cosgrove, Dana Gaier Ellis, Nev Scharrel, Pierre Coffin, Steve Coogan, Julie Andrews, Jenny Slate
- Score: 4.9 of 10 (Metacritic 49/100)
- Worldwide gross: $1.035 billion
Gru, Lucy, and the Dumont Diamond
The plot picks up some time after Despicable Me 2. Gru and Lucy Wilde are married Anti-Villain League agents. They are sent to recover the stolen Dumont Diamond from Balthazar Bratt, a former child star who turned supervillain after his show, Evil Bratt, was canceled. Gru gets the diamond back. Bratt escapes.
That opening is the cleanest thing in the movie, and it still isn’t clean. The AVL headquarters sequence introduces Silas Ramsbottom’s retirement and the appointment of board member Valerie Da Vinci as the new director. Da Vinci fires Gru and Lucy, on the grounds that they should have captured Bratt during the mission. So the film’s engine is a workplace grievance. That’s the joke it keeps returning to, and it never gets funnier than the first time.
Back home, Gru and Lucy tell their adopted daughters Margo, Edith and Agnes that they’ve been dismissed. They promise new jobs are coming. Gru refuses to return to being a supervillain. His assistant Dr. Nefario is accidentally frozen in carbonite, which is a gag that exists mainly to get him off the board. Most of the Minions, led by Mel, abandon Gru to find new jobs, and are eventually prosecuted for trespassing at a television studio.
Freedonia and the Long-Lost Twin
Then a butler named Fritz shows up at Gru’s home with an invitation from Gru’s long-lost twin brother Dru, who lives in a distant country called Freedonia. The family travels there and finds immense wealth and a mansion.
Dru reveals that their late father was a supervillain known as “the Bald Terror.” The family fortune comes from his villainous activities and technological advances. Dru wants Gru to teach him how to be a villain. Gru refuses to revert to his old ways. Lucy struggles with her new tasks as a mother. Dru and Gru grow closer after joyriding in their father’s high-tech vehicle. The two brothers decide to steal the diamond, though Gru secretly intends to bring Bratt in.
Meanwhile Bratt has stolen the diamond again. He plans to use it to power a giant robot that will destroy Hollywood, as revenge for his show’s cancellation.
Steve Carell voices both Gru and Dru. That dual role is the film’s central stunt, and it is a thin one. Dru is Gru with better hair and worse judgment. The contrast the movie needs — a real split between the reformed man and the brother who wants the old life back — never lands, because the script keeps both of them inside the same set of jokes.
Trey Parker’s Balthazar Bratt
Trey Parker voices Balthazar Bratt, and he is the best reason to sit through this. Parker said he took the role to have a work he could watch with his infant daughter. He had seen and liked Illumination’s films with her. He found it amusing to do something not written by him, the first time since BASEketball in 1998.
He compared Bratt to Kirk Cameron, who “got really religious, and he just seemed so pissed,” and considered imitating Cameron for the performance. That is a sharper read on the character than the film itself manages. Bratt is an ’80s child star frozen at the moment of his cancellation, and the movie has the sense not to explain him too much. It just lets him be a man in a purple suit with a keytar and a grudge.
The problem is that Bratt’s revenge plot — the giant robot, the destruction of Hollywood — is boilerplate. The 1980s references are decoration, not structure. A villain whose whole wound is a canceled show should get a climax that understands television, and instead he gets a robot. The tagline is “Oh brother,” which is a pun on the twin and a sigh about the material.
The Minions Problem
The Minions, led by Mel, walk out on Gru and get prosecuted for trespassing at a television studio. That subplot is a holding pen. It keeps the franchise mascots on screen without giving them anything to do with the actual story.
This is the structural rot at the center of Despicable Me 3. The film has three plots — Gru’s firing, Dru’s mentorship, Bratt’s revenge — plus a Minion detour and a Lucy-as-mother thread. None of them are given the room to pay off, and the movie solves the problem by rushing every resolution.
The animation is fine. Illumination’s house style is bright and legible, and it holds up. Heitor Pereira and Pharrell Williams returned to compose the score, and the music does its job without ever becoming the thing you remember.
Mixed Reviews, a Billion Dollars
Despicable Me 3 debuted at the Annecy International Animated Film Festival on June 14, 2017. Universal Pictures released it in the United States on June 30. It received mixed reviews from critics. It grossed $1.035 billion worldwide, becoming the fourth-highest-grossing film of 2017 and the fourth-highest-grossing animated film of all time during its theatrical run.
That gap is the story. A movie this shapeless, this content to coast, pulled in a billion dollars. The audience for Minions is not asking for a better movie, and Illumination knows it. A further sequel, Despicable Me 4, was released in 2024.
Development on a third main Despicable Me film began in 2013, with Coffin returning as director alongside Balda. The film was in the early writing stages by 2014. The cast was announced in 2016. Three years of development produced a movie whose best idea — a twin brother voiced by the same actor — is also its most obvious one.
What Despicable Me 3 Gets Wrong
The dismissal from the AVL should sting. It doesn’t, because the film treats Gru’s unemployment as a setup for the Freedonia trip rather than as a loss. Gru refuses to be a supervillain again, which is the one genuinely interesting choice anyone makes in this movie, and the script spends the rest of the runtime walking it back without ever making the walk-back cost him anything.
Julie Andrews voices Gru’s Mom. Steve Coogan voices Fritz and Silas Ramsbottom. Jenny Slate voices Valerie Da Vinci. Miranda Cosgrove returns as Margo, and Nev Scharrel replaced Elsie Fisher as Agnes. These are good actors doing competent work in a movie that gives most of them one scene and a paycheck.
The Minions remain the franchise’s real product, and Despicable Me 3 knows it. The Mel-led walkout is a commercial obligation dressed as a plot. It is also, tellingly, the only thread in the movie that gets a clean beginning, middle and end — because it doesn’t have to connect to anything.
Why the Billion Doesn’t Rescue It
Despicable Me 3 is a 90-minute film carrying more story than it can resolve, and it never cuts any of it. Trey Parker’s Balthazar Bratt is the one performance with a point of view. Steve Carell’s double act is a stunt that never becomes a character study. The Freedonia mansion, the giant robot, the carbonite gag, the trespassing trial — they’re all set pieces passing through, none of them building on the last.
The $1.035 billion gross is not evidence the film worked. It’s evidence the brand worked, which is a different claim. Despicable Me 3 is the moment the series stopped pretending the movies were the point.
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