Review
Supervillain movie conveys mild entertainment, predictability
November 10, 2010
This is a fairly exciting time for me as a movie fan. There’s a new Coen Brothers movie on its way, a new Darren Aronofsky movie coming down the pipes, Emma Watson is legal now (I think) and a documentary about one of my newly favorite bands is debuting in Minneapolis in a couple weeks.
Unfortunately, all of this excitement is centered on movies that still have yet to be released.
Usually I’ll prepare for seeing what I think might be a bad movie by reminding myself that I’ll get to have some fun wiping my feet on it in my little review where, but the tumbleweeds were really blowing around the ‘‘Now Playing’’ lists this weekend.
With absolutely nothing that caught my interest I pretty much left the decision up to my friend, who elected “Megamind” as the film we’d see this week.
“Oh, you mean that big-name, computer-animated, 3-D, superhero movie that looks like the pitch was ‘why don’t we just combine everything that’s making money at the box office right now into one movie?’ Okay. Good choice buddy.”
Anyway, it looked like the opposite of the movies that I really enjoy.
“Megamind” is the superman-cliche soaked story of two super-beings from outer space that are sent to earth as infants and immediately form a legendary rivalry.
Megamind himself (Will Ferrell) is a blue-pigmented, nerdy space-genius who decides to become a super-villain after being picked last for dodgeball in grade school.
He has a trusty minion named Minion (David Cross), and a secret lair filled with levers and blinking lights and knobs and “exit” doors that lead to alligator pits.
He has built his entire life around the role-play between himself and his arch-rival, Metro Man (Brad Pitt), until one of his evil plans actually works and Metro Man gets fried to a crisp by a death ray (you read that right, Brad Pitt isn’t quite in the movie as much as advertised).
At first, Megamind can hardly contain his joy at finally coming out on top, but he soon realizes that he has annihilated the yin to his yang.
In most senses, it was pretty much was I was expecting: A lot of jokes you see coming at you from a mile away. But what was unexpected was, well, just how unexpected some things were.
Spliced in with the cookie-cutter humor are lots of subtle and quirky little jokes that seem like they were thrown in at the last minute just for fun and actually took a little bit of sharpness to catch on to (e.g: an odd little Donkey Kong NES reference).
The animation wasn’t the most incredible I’ve ever seen, but a few breathtaking scenes are pulled off. Plus it was the first new generation 3-D movie that I’ve seen (I know, I know) which was admittedly less tacky that I had anticipated.
So here’s the deal: “Megamind” is a mildly entertaining, PG, computer-animated film with writing and a plot that seemed like it was thrown together willy-nilly but will certainly do if all you need are some $3 dumb laughs from a movie you’ll forget about the second the credits roll.
Anthony Orlando is a math major and physics minor. He runs for the UW-River Falls cross country team. He once met Dan Auerbach and is a minor celebrity in Malaysia.