It topped the box office this past weekend, which isn’t hard to do, since most of the movies in the theaters about now are lame in the run up to the Scary Potter megamillions later this month. It is the latest salvo from Dream Works in the ongoing war with Pixar to win the hearts and minds of kids everywhere.  Alas, it does not have the wit and script of most of the Pixar films or Universal’s Despicable Me (which has better Minions as well).   But it does have Will Ferrell who is still feral,  Tiny Fey who is still fey, and Ben Stiller who is still Ben, not to mention Brad Pit, whose is mostly AWOL because his role is the pits in this movie (he’s retired as Megaman).

The visuals are of course well done, though if I have one more object thrusting off the screen and up my already 3-D nose or by my head, I will scream.  The megabucks are not worth it to see Megamind. By this I mean, you are not missing much in this film if you see it at the cheaper 2-D price. But is it worth seeing?  Well, for a movie that’s only one hour and 36 minutes to start with, it has some longish slow stretches, which is hard to do in such a film.  But somehow they managed. And the humor is mostly over kid’s heads. And as for the plot—- oh my aching Carolina blue head.   It needs an extreme makeover.  The premise is good enough, but is a rerun— bad guy becomes good guy when humanized by love.  This was also the plot of Despicable Me, only there it was the love of children, not romance, as here.  

The movie begins with a flashback to the origins of the tales of Megamind and Metro Man who both come to earth from outer space. One has to wonder why considering the current globally warmed condition of earth. Didn’t they have enough U-V rays where they came from?  Some of the dialogue is rather cute as is the depiction of Roxie the reporter. But its never a good thing when the trailer is better than the film, or worse, has all the best bits of the film in it, in which case,  you needed only about a 2 minute film— a true short subject.  But I digress.  The creators of Shrek could have done better than this. 

Still, the film has its moments (see the trailer in the accompanying blog entry), and  Megamind is funny with his mispronunciations even of Hello!  His is a character worth of better character development. This movie is harmless fun, doesn’t involve bad language, has some decent visual moments, and is safe to take your kids to.  But you would do better to show them the DVD of Despicable Me, and talk to them about how people can change, even bad people.