Meh-gamind

My wife and I took our sons to see Megamind last weekend. We have a tradition after seeing movies together of getting in the car and immediately conducting a survey of each family member’s favorite part.

After movies that have us all excited, the scenes we most enjoyed come to us easily. Often, we recall more than one scene apiece, scenes that make the person who just mentioned their favorite say, “Oh, yeah, I liked that part too.” Following painfully awful movies, my sons usually have some random scene they thought was funny and I say my favorite part was the end.

So when we piled into the minivan after Megamind, our conversation was a bit unusual. We all agreed that we enjoyed the movie, but nobody could really come up with a particular scene that we could call our favorite. Not much of it was very memorable.

The whole movie exuded an aura of okay-ness. It wasn’t a terrible movie. But it wasn’t spectacular. It just was.

The action sequences were good. The storyline was okay and unique enough to merit the film’s production. The characters were relatively amusing. But nothing really stood out. There were enough funny moments to keep you from wanting to go choke the projectionist, but not enough to prompt you to memorize the lines and repeat them ad nausea afterward. Will Ferrell did jokes he had done before in other movies (like the being much to close to an explosion over-reaction from The Other Guys), Tina Fey and David Cross pretty much read lines off a script and Brad Pitt added his voice in an “I’m the universally famous handsome actor, Brad Pitt and it’s below me to the point of amusement that I’m lending my voice to this film” kind of way.

The most enjoyable part of this film for me was the awkwardly neurotic ramblings of the character that Jonah Hill voiced. Even though I sometimes wonder how long we are going to continue to find blatant stalking behavior comedic (thanks, Ben Stiller), I still found his scenes in the movie to be the funniest. Although, if you had enough of him after Knocked Up, Superbad, Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek, then he’ll probably only drag this movie further down into mediocrity for you.

Overall, this movie was decent, but I have to be honest and tell you I dozed off at one point, 3D glasses still on my face. As far as Dreamworks animated features go, it was no Shrek or How to Train Your Dragon, but it was a hell of a lot better than Antz (with a z, really?) or Shark Tale. But is that really saying much?

Should you choose to take your kids to see it, you won’t hate the experience, but like movie theater popcorn, you might feel like you paid for more than you got.