'Despicable Me 3' proves to be the biggest let down of the summer

It is hard To Be too critical of a children's movie, but "Despicable Me" was different. For one thing, the first two had a lot of elements that appealed to adults who are, really, who gets to watch the film 100 times with their kids from moment that it hits the DVD shelves. The music, some of the jokes, and the feel of the film was always adult friendly and not terribly annoying (like say, Barnie).

Even the music harkened back to the 80's mainstream (which is both good and, sometimes, awful).

While the music is still there (with the same results), "Despicable Me 3" has to be one of the worst movies released in modern memory. There is no easy way to put it. The whole film is centered around pointless sight gags. The rather clever writing of a real script that the franchise was known for is nowhere to be found. The scenes do not even fit together and are as disjointed as a William Burroughs novel cut up and spliced together while on a binge.

Where did it go wrong?

It seems, as one (tries) to watch the movie, that they simply wanted to get a film out as quickly as possible that featured these zany faces and silly characters that everyone loved.

The problem is that the characters in "Despicable Me" were loved because the movie and the writing were funny, not because someone can make a yellow cylinder talk on a computer screen.

Now not only is the writing not funny and painfully forced to the point of being contrived, but there really is no writing. The script is just a borrowing of past adventures and offers more waffling about being "good or bad." While this the backdrop of the franchise, this time, it was more like watching paint dry while old jokes were told that you know the punchline to already.

What will be the despicable future?

America is sometimes a pretty dumbed down country. It is possible that there really are enough kids who won't see that there is a big difference between the first two and this latest pandering movie.

Then again, children can be a lot smarter than we give them credit for, so perhaps even they shall be Let Down.

One of the things that have been lost since we took the transition from drawing to making all animated features on a computer, is that this new medium is often lacking in substance as it is so easy to add flare and filler. That means that the same American who cannot shut off the cell phone for more than a moment without freaking out is really able to be distracted by a puppet show with poor puppet masters on the paddles.

When the electric guitar came to be popular, no one stopped playing the acoustic guitar. When airbrushing came into vogue, people did not stop painting with a regular paint brush.

However, now that PIXAR and others have begun with this computer-only format, the quality of the actual content has gone down in direct proportion to the studio's ability to churn out mindless media.

Perhaps all of this is being a little hard on the movie. After all, who are we to ask for anything with substance?