But broad humor compensates, including a scene where a wealthy victim of Lucy’s incompetent hair care chases her through a supermarket like the T-1000 in “Terminator 2: Judgment Day” (of course they quote Brad Fiedel’s score). There’s also early-“Simpsons” visual marginalia that sends up the blandly cheerful consumerism of American culture. The supermarket’s cereal section offers Skinny Bits, Fluffy, and Atomic Sugar Bombz. The design of the suburbanites skewers modern cliches of wardrobe, grooming, and plastic surgery/Botox in a manner that might make some parents feel seen, in a mortifying way. Potential recurring characters are added to the core cast, notably the teenage girl next door, Poppy Prescott (Joey King), who wants to be a supervillain and drags Gru into a half-baked scheme to steal a mascot from his former school.
There’s a lot more to the film’s story, such as it is. But what passes for plot in the script (cowritten by Ken Daurio and Mike White, who teamed on Illumination’s “Migration”) is really more like actionable information, offered to the filmmakers so that a joke or a chain reaction of interlocked gags can be set up and paid off. There are times when it feels as if White and Daurio are writing less for structure’s sake and more to provide the voice actors and animators with raw material that can build to a wild sight gag with weird grace notes, as when Gru accidentally jabs himself in the leg with a hypodermic needle full of sedative, then rides a Minion like a miniature burro while using his useless leg as a riding crop.
Other moments are fleeting, rooted in a character’s distinctive body language, and can be savored in the way that you’d savor a detail in a live action comedy performance, like Poppy and her cat playing Dance Dance Revolution (both with the same rigid “in the zone” face), or Gru nearly getting swallowed up by Poppy’s beanbag chair and then daintily crossing his legs at the knees.
Of course the Minion army is on the slapstick case, too. They’re all-in, Three Stooges style, pratfalling and pranking and slapping, drenching each other in viscous substances, chortling and babbling and giggling. There’s even a moment where an authority figure tells a crowd of Minions about a dangerous experiment and asks for volunteer to step forward, and all the Minions behind the ones in the first row step back. The dinosaurs laughed at that one.