MEGAMIND VS. THE DOOM SYNDICATE -- A Case Against the Entire Medium of Animation

Review by Camden Ferrell

​Do you remember 2010’s Megamind? It was quite a delightful film with some solid voice acting and genuine heart and humor at its core. What if I told you after many long years, fans are finally getting the sequel they’ve been begging for? And what if I told you that it has all the same characters but nothing else that made the movie good? Megamind vs. the Doom Syndicate may be one of the biggest cinematic crimes in recent memory, effectively treating the character’s legacy with about the same delicacy as one would treat toilet paper during a bout of food poisoning. 
 
After the actual character growth that we see from Megamind in the first movie, why would we want to see him progress anymore? We get the privilege to watch him have the same development as a napkin while he deals with his old villain team, The Doom Syndicate. He must act like his new hero status is a rouse while he figures out a way to stop them. Meanwhile, as an audience member, you’ll likely need to figure out who needs to be punished for this abomination.
 
Written like a low-quality kid’s program, it feels like the days of AI-written scripts are finally here. It would be genuinely shocking if AI wasn’t involved in some capacity in the production of this movie. The dialogue is painful in unfathomable ways. This is the kind of storytelling you tolerate for 15 minutes from a toddler at a family gathering before making an excuse to step away. I feel bad for being so rough on something that clearly took some amount of man hours, but it’s such a low effort attempt that I don’t even imagine anyone would care.

​The movie is full of over-acting voice actors (including Talon Warburton who sounds like a discount version of his dad), and it doesn’t do much to help the shoddy material. I don’t want to bash the cast too much just because it’s mildly refreshing to see actual voice actors receiving work, but it’s just a shame it’s at the expense of the rare instance of celebrities who did a solid job the first time around. And for some weird reason, Tony Hale is in this. I guess the Veep residuals are drying up. He could have probably made more if he asked Pixar to make more Forky shorts.
 
The main problem is that there is no soul to this movie. It is one of the films ever. It has a story. It has sound. It has visuals. It certainly is a movie. However, at no point during this movie did I have the semblance of a positive thought. It’s not just indifference, I think my life has actively become worse because of this. They should have given this the Batgirl treatment and axed it for tax purposes. What does the studio gain by releasing this? Less people sending them emails asking for a Megamind sequel?
 
Megamind vs. The Doom Syndicate is about as pleasant as a colonoscopy. It certainly is fun to watch a beloved character from your childhood get massacred alongside some random new character who is a few steps away from becoming Jake Gyllenhaal in Nightcrawler. This movie is a case to defund animation programs around the country. Avoid this movie at all cost and consider praying to whatever god you believe in to alleviate me of the burden of having witnessed this.
 
Megamind vs. The Doom Syndicate is streaming on Peacock March 1.
 
Rating: 0.5/5