Dispicable Me 2 - Movie Review and general rant - 5th July
It”s not often that I am motivated enough to write a moview review. It has to be super good or extremely bad and Dispicable Me 2 falls off the bad end of the scale in a major way. My biggest issue with this movie is that it is an adults film masquerading as a kids film. And the trailer I saw was misleading. It only had the minions involved and nothing about the adult story line.
There are so many things wrong with this movie I”ll try to be legible!
This movie is about Gru, a criminal who has turned good and adopted three girls (I didn”t see the previous film) and is trying to be good. He gets kidnapped by the good guys who want him to help them find some mastermind criminal. So far it”s not too bad. Then we have the BBQ where a very cliched woman tries to set Gru up with her friends. Cue sexuality (hair flinging, hip swinging, provocatively dressed neighbour) showing him her equally cliched friends. (Oh, and the movie starts with two MEN – not kids – gambling for money). Then the movie deviates into a romance. Gru”s kids try to set him up with dates because they want a mother and the spy (beautifully voiced by Kristen Wiig) has the hots for Gru. Which reminds me that one of the minions has the hots for her and we see his thoughts about what he would like to be doing with her which my daughter later asked me to clarify because she couldn”t understand why it had interrupted the story line to show it. Gru has a date during the film with the worst kind of female cliche who is then tasered by his real love interest and carried out of the restaurant between the two of them in a drunken parody you would expect to find in a frat boys movie. The stern policeman was there and all. Later Gru treats everyone badly when Lucy (the love interest) leaves and disolves into a pathetically cliched mess of the commitment phobic male.
Oh, and to round out the cliches we have the teenage daughter taking her iPhone to bed (one of the issues in our society for those without teenagers is that teens have their electronic media on them 24/7 and are incredibly sleep deprived because they stay on these devices late at night. There are so many things wrong with this practice – overstimulation being just one – this will have to be another post) and then meets the quintessential badboy who cheats on her in the end!
Now am I the only person who sees that this is not a film for children under 13? And yet the cinema was full of primary school aged children – three of whom were mine. My boys thought it was okay and that is because to make the film more kid-like the writer and director intersperse the minions in the highly adult scenes and then usually have someone hit over the head or falling off something high. But for all that the only real laughs in the cinema were adult sniggering. Honestly, I tuned into the laugh factor from the kids because I wanted to see if I was completely off base and there weren”t many from my audience.
But that is despite the point. The point is that in our society we have gambling problems, teenage sex problems, we have women being raped and bashed in our streets, we have HUGE teenage drinking and drug problems PlayHippo ar ett nat onlinesverigecasinon.com fullmatat med spel i alla kategorier. and we have kids on too much social media that is not policed by the parents. Movies like this send out subliminal messages to our babies that this is okay. That this is normal and yet I don”t know a mother with primary school aged kids who doesn”t worry on some level about what the teenage years will bring. If you let your kids watch these kinds of films I think the future is clear.
As parents we need to take a stand against this kind of thing. And Dispicable Me 2 isn”t the only film like this (Madagascar also has gambling, mafia themes, sexualisation but at a smaller scale) – but the sexualisation of all the female characters and the romance element shocked me more than anything because what six year old is interested in romance. Many adults will say that all this goes over the kid”s heads. Let me tell you that NOTHING goes over our kids heads. Of course they don”t “get it” but what they get is the imagery. They get the subliminal messages about what our society looks like and while they are young you can throw all the “good messages” about what they are seeing at them until the cows come home but you can”t control how they perceive the information. Young children can”t conceptualise. That”s a fact. They can”t see that the woman in the restaurant is a parody because they don”t know what a parody is. To a young child things just are. So why don”t we give our kids beautiful experiences so that these are the types of things they seek out when they are older.
Do you know I still want a sweet biscuit with my cup of tea when I have one? I want this because that is what I experienced as a child. I seek to replicate this experience as an adult. What habits do we set up for our kids to seek out when they are older and acting through their subconscious? I also spent most of my late teenage years wearing sexy outfits with absolutely no idea how to say no to a man. Why? Because my mother was forced to wear hand me downs as a child and she always wanted her daughter to look beautiful and to show off her figure. My subliminal messages from my parent (not to mention MTV) was to dress sexy. Then I was sent out into the world where men wanted a piece of what it looked like I was offering. For someone who was looking for true love this was not an easy mix.
I say that film makers of kids movies need to stop trying to please the adults in the theatre and just focus on what the kids want. In trying to keep the adults coming into the cinema they are damaging our most precious objects by filling their heads with absolute rubbish. Like most women, when I was pregnant I ate well and followed all the guidelines to bring a healthy baby into the world. Unfortunately once that baby is in the world society values then say we have to let them go. I believe this is when they need to be held the tightest. This is when the real work starts. Raising healthy adults is a lot more than staying away from soft cheeses when we are pregnant. I urge all mothers not to give up on their children just because we live in a society that, for the most part, has no idea how to raise them.
Dispicable Me 2 is a boring cliche you would never see as an adult. Don”t subject your kids to it. Give them a more beautiful experience than that.
I think you are looking at this all wrong… You can teach your kids that being on there phones and doing drugs and having sex is all wrong but let’s face it they won’t listen to you. They will learn from there friends from school. They will try things because its the way to stay “cool” and “hip”. I think you are looking at thus movie like it has hidden messages. Disney movies are worse and here you are raising hell about a love story. About a father adopting kids and trying to make them happy..
I am the father of a little girl and a baby boy. I cannot agree with you more. Sadly this is not isolated to just a few movies. The fact is that it is almost everywhere now. Our children are subjected to hypersexualization at such a very early age. The “programs” that they watch on television are just that- programs. I advise that every parent review ALL media before allowing your children to watch anything. Having watched the first two Despicable Me movies, I thought the new Minions movie would be geared towards the younger audience since the minions seemed… Read more »