Ill-Informed Gadfly

“The Last Airbender” was an old-fashioned turkey, easy to mock for its spectacular ineptitude and its desperate 11th-hour conversion to 3D. A week later brings a new bid to goad families into theaters, the animated comedy “Despicable Me,” about a washed-up supervillain who adopts three orphan girls. It will get better reviews. But to these eyes it’s a more insidious and depressing film. “The Last Airbender” was clueless and dunderheaded; it couldn’t help itself. The makers of “Despicable Me” know exactly what they’re doing, and what they’re doing is reprehensible. It’s a calculatingly vapid commodity, always making the lazy, obvious choices. It doesn’t entertain; at best, it distracts. It has virtually no story or likable characters, so it’s packed with throwaway sight gags, most of which ask us to chuckle at physical pain or humiliation. The French filmmakers lack vision or charm, and they wallow matter-of-factly in the coarsest elements of American culture. They make no attempt to amuse adults and children at the same time. “Despicable Me” is festooned with references that young viewers have no capacity to understand, like a shameless and pointless homage to the horse’s-head scene in “The Godfather.” On top of the violence and mild scatology, there is of course cloying sentimentality, as the malevolent if hapless bad guy is reformed by fatherhood. Of course, he only turned dastardly because his mother neglected him. The moral, then, is that parental love is a good thing, so take it to heart and spare your kids from “Despicable Me.”