Something borrowed, something blue

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 05/11/2010 (5775 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

THIS amusing animated superhero mov­ie suffers a little too much from the affliction that seems to infect almost all films in the Dreamworks Animation brand. Like the Shrek quadrilogy, it is packaged as a kids movie, but its humour is so frequently aimed above little heads, it feels as if the children have been all but abandoned by the filmmakers.

So ill-considered are the juveniles that, at one point, a character angrily denies the existence of a certain Easter hare and a certain dentally oriented flying sprite during a comic rant.

It’s funny, but only if you aren’t in the company of a small child who is going to ask: “What did he mean by that?”

As with the recent Despicable Me, Megamind puts the spotlight on a habitual megalomaniac bad guy. Blue-skinned alien genius Megamind (voiced by Will Ferrell) comes to Earth as a baby after his home planet explodes, much like Superman. Unfortunately, he arrives at the same time as a more conventionally handsome and conventionally heroic jettisoned baby, who has the good fortune to land in an affluent home, while the blue-skinned babe lands in a high-security facility housing evil geniuses.

Destiny seems to decree that Megamind will be a professional bad guy while the lantern-jawed baby who grows up to be Metro Man (voiced by Brad Pitt) will always be there to confound his latest evil scheme. In the middle is reporter Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey), the spunky, unflappable reporter who has so often been kidnapped by Megamind, she treats him with the same resignation she would assign to working overtime.

But when Megamind unexpectedly defeats Metro Man, our villain really does get the blues because, he realizes, he needs a nemesis to define him. So he invents a nemesis, giving superpowers to Roxanne’s nebbishy cameraman (Jonah Hill). Megamind even dons a disguise (think of Marlon Brando’s Jor-El in Superman) to give the lad, dubbed “Tighten,” an education in the proper uses of superpowers.

Suffice it to say the education doesn’t take, and the perpetual bad guy must defy his destiny and save the day for a change.

As with Despicable Me, Megamind can’t hold a computer-generated candle to Pixar’s brilliant riff on the superhero genre, The Incredibles. Instead of inventing new tropes, director Tom McGrath (Madagascar) relies more on a kind of lazy parody, specifically with his twisted take on the Superman/Lois Lane/Lex Luthor triangle of Superman myth.

The production and the 3-D are first-rate, at least, and the voice cast, which also includes David Cross as Megamind’s fishy minion named Minion, adds more than it detracts, particularly Ferrell, working well within his live-action specialty of pompous self-delusion.

But where, oh, where is the hero this movie really needs?

Look! Up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane!

It’s… a gifted screenwriter!

Too late, alas.

 

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca