My daughter, aged six, loves movies. She doesn’t tend to care what they’re about, what the characters are like, whether they’re funny or sad or whatever. She’s more interested in the fact that they’re happening and they exist in front of her eyes for a period of time.

For her, movies are enablers. They enable her not to do tidying, or maths homework, and they enable her to scoff fistfuls of popcorn and guzzle sugary drinks. It’s in her personal interest to love movies, and so whenever I take her along to see one, her response to “What did you think?” is always the same: “100 out of ten!”

Lest my daughter one day read this and feel as if I’m belittling her taste, I will defend myself and say that no kid has good movie taste. She represents the child masses in this respect. That’s why we have films like Despicable Me 4, ephemeral diversions that allow time to be spent away from other things. Personally, I wasn’t able to deduce many creative reasons for a film like this to exist, but as it’s part of the most financially successful animation franchise in the history of cinema (sic!), I guess I should take my creative reasons and shove ‘em.

This time around it’s the same characters, the same gags, the same minions, the same wacky yet bland animation style, yet all with massively diminishing returns. All the landscape and character design has been carried over from the previous films, so there’s very little that’s new here. The onus to innovate and change tack when you’re standing at the peak of a mountain of cash is just not going to be there, and so the name of the game is play it safe and make sure you can usher the kids across the finish line in as quick and easy a manner as possible.

A film such as Despicable Me 4 just has to stay the course, and that’s what it does with this paper-thin fourquel in which erstwhile supervillain Gru, now in the pay of the Anti-Villain League, assists his new colleagues to take down cockroach-fixated showboat, Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell). When Maxime springs out of jail and vows vengeance, Gru and his fam (which now includes the baby from The Boss Baby), are placed into the witness relocation programme, with singularly unsatisfying results.

Even the scattergun antics of those lovable minions fall flat this time out, signalling how little juice remains in this particular creative tank. The creation of a genetically-modified team of superheroes, the Mega Minions, offers little more than an excuse for a series of weak sketches in which the newly-buff yellow fellas exercise their powers in a range of dumb ways, much to the chagrin of a needy public.

What these films do prove, however, is that there is still life in the theatrical experience yet, and animated family features, particularly those that are part of franchises, seem to be single handedly keeping the multiplex lights on at the moment. Whether any rational adult will come away from this with a rekindled desire to experience the seventh art in its intended setting is unlikely, but we can hope that these films will introduce the notion of spectacle to younger viewers in the hope that, one day, they’ll be heading into the dark on their own to a Jean Renoir retrospective.

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