Despicable Me 4 Review: A 3 Out of 10 That Feels Like Six Shorts Stitched Together

My rating for Despicable Me 4 is a 3 out of 10. That is my opinion as an adult, not as a toddler who would just be looking at the pretty colors, and that is really what I want people to take away from this review.

Poppy, the new protégé, does not show up until halfway through Despicable Me 4

Going into the screening, everything pointed to this being Poppy's movie. There had been a BTS and Minions collaboration event beforehand, with a room built around Poppy and BTS branding, so it felt like she was going to be heavily featured. Instead she does not arrive until the film is halfway over, and what should have felt like a protégé being handed the torch by her villain mentor instead turns into Gru chasing a longing for a natural born child, a child who, even after all that, ends up as a cockroach.

Because of that structure, the movie does not hang together as one story. "It felt more like six individual shorts all jammed together to make one long feature rather than one cohesive movie."

The women in Despicable Me 4 are not given much to do

There were women in the film, but I did not feel they were represented in a way I appreciated. Sofía Vergara plays a character who felt like the token woman of the movie, and it seemed like she had a full script's worth of lines that got stripped down until she was mostly reduced to grunting and giggling rather than a fully developed character.

Gru's wife, forced into witness protection after one of Gru's old high school bullies threatens the family, becomes a hairdresser, the one thing she wants to do, and then loses her own hair to a chemical accident. Rather than getting a redemption arc where she learns the trade and grows into her new life, she simply runs off with the two eldest adopted daughters without ever apologizing, treating her villain moment as something to shrug off with a fun day out instead of a real lesson.

Gru's relationship with his daughters gets pushed aside for his new son

The first film built to an emotional payoff of the three adopted girls finally calling Gru "dad." In this one, they are back to calling him "Gru" the entire time while he fixates on getting his infant son to call him "daddy." It reads as though having a natural born child mattered more to him than the daughters he already earned.

That shift shows up clearly with Margo. Facing a difficult first day at a new school where she gets glitter bombed and bullied, she gets no real sympathy from Gru, who deflects by joking about having banana on his nose from the baby. The Gru of the earlier films would have gone into full protective mode for his daughters. This version barely engages with what Margo went through.

The music stood out even though the film felt like a goodbye

Setting the story aside, the music in Despicable Me 4 was a highlight throughout. "The music in this film slapped." Given the full Minions and BTS collaboration tied to the release, it was surprising that only one BTS song actually made it into the film. The closing song gave the whole thing the feel of a farewell, leaving it unclear whether the girls or Poppy will return, though revisiting the villain school setting without centering Gru and the girls again would be a welcome direction for the series.