Critics reviews

One of the strangest, most pleasing aspects of all is how the series seems to understand single parents on a deep level. I've never tried to steal the moon, as Gru did in the first film, but I know what it's like to have your daughter (adopted daughter in Gru's case) threaten to crumple up in tears at the possibility that a scheduled "fairy princess" won't arrive at her birthday party.

The only characters developed here are the cyclopean yellow monsters known as the Minions, whose irreverent tirades recall the anarchic slapstick of Chico Marx and early Looney Tunes.

The new film can't quite match the sheer ingenuity of the original, so it has to make do with scale. The gags are often bigger and faster than those from the earlier film, though not always funnier.

There are so many ways Despicable Me 2 could have gone wrong, and so many things it does right. Working from a script by Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul (who also wrote the first film), directors Coffin and Renaud take great care with the pacing. The opening, in which an Arctic Circle research facility is whisked off into the sky, is extravagant in a James Bond way.

A fleeter film than its predecessor, Despicable Me 2 delights more often than it disappoints. With Gru's unctuously irritable personality already established, codirectors Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud let their loony imaginations run wild: Where else will you find a movie that references the point-and-scream alien call from the 1978 Invasion of the Body Snatchers while also making room for a hilarious Minions-performed rendition of "I Swear"?

Screenwriters Ken Daurio and Cinco Paul, who also penned the original film, expedite all character and narrative development to fit in more half-measured subplots (Margo's new boyfriend, Dr. Nefario's resignation), which takes the focus away from the more admirable elements of Despicable Me (the gadgets, Gru's struggle with villainy) and make Despicable Me 2 feel oddly incomplete.

Right down to the closing-credits ‘audition' for their upcoming spin-off feature, the frantic antics of these critters are scarcely disguised as the film's raison d'être. The human activity, including Gru and Lucy's appealing but half-baked romance, is strictly to get us from A to, well, A. Youngsters won't mind. Their parents will be as charmed or annoyed – or, maybe, both – as they were the first time.