MOVIE REVIEWS: “DESPICABLE ME”

Several of Roger Ebert’s recent reviews have amounted to a campaign against 3D. His review of Despicable Me is no exception. After giving the film a positive review, he writes: “The sad thing,” Ebert writes, “is that the 3-D process produces a picture more dim than it should be. … Take my word for it: Try to find it in 2-D. Or, if you see it in 3-D, check out the trailers online to see how bright and cheery it would look in 2-D. How can people deceive themselves that 3-D is worth paying extra for?” A.O. Scott in the New York Times suggests that the movie actually doesn’t offer much at all worth paying for. “So much is going on in this movie that, while there’s nothing worth despising, there’s not much to remember either,” he writes. For Carrie Rickey at the Philadelphia Inquirer, the movie is simply a derivative 3-D animation, affable if utterly inconsequential.” Likewise Mick LaSalle in the San Francisco Chronicle concludes: “It’s not bad. It has its moments.” On the other hand, Kyle Smith in the New York Post calls it a “dazzlingly animated 3D movie.” Jason Alexander in the Toronto Star considers it “the summer’s wittiest kids’ flick.” And Roger Moore in the Orlando Sentinel pronounces it “dizzy, diverting fun.” Speaking of pronunciations, “despicable” used to be on every high-school English teacher’s list of commonly mispronounced words. It is mispronounced here, something no major critic has mentioned. (The accent should correctly be placed on the first syllable.)