As I was watching Despicable Me 4, I realized I have seen three of these movies (five if you count the Minions spin-off movies) and I literally remember nothing about them. I have spent time with these characters and this world and very little about them or it has any staying power for me. These are very nothing animated movies that are for very small children, and designed to come out in the middle of summer, and give parents something to take their children to where they will hopefully shut up for two hours while the parents can enjoy sitting somewhere with air conditioning blasting. The same is true for this new installment.

Former supervillain Gru (Steve Carrell) and his wife Lucy (Kristen Wiig) have finally settled into a comfortable life with their two daughters and newborn son. Suddenly, supervillain Maxime Le Mal (Will Ferrell) shows up, targeting Gru and his family. The family is relocated into what is basically witness protection, placed in an affluent suburbia where fish out of water antics ensue. A million other things happen too and so little of it means anything.

Despicable Me 4 is sound and fury signifying nothing. It’s eye popping visuals and colors and lots of top 40 radio hits. It’s loud and grating and excruciating to endure from beginning to end. The script feels like it was written by artificial intelligence, and not the brilliant Mike White, who co-wrote the script with the returning Ken Daurio. So much is going on here, and yet nothing is going on here. There are so many side plots, lots of chaos and no real story. There are a million little bits that don’t form a story with any cohesion. I’m tempted to grade this on a bit of a curve because I know I am not the audience for these movies. I don’t know if there is a target audience for these movies, with the exception of very young children, children who were not born when the last one of these came out. And yet, with movies like Inside Out 2 and Robot Dreams in theaters, you’re really doing your children a disservice taking them to Despicable Me 4.

We have a great voice cast here. Nobody has anything fun to do. Will Ferrell has that thing where apparently doing a goofy accent is enough of a character to allow him to phone in the rest of this. Sofia Vergara as his wife, basically just sounds like Sofia Vergara, but the creative team isn’t smart enough to let her improvise and have fun with this, because I know she can be a lot funnier under the right circumstances. We have Joey King as Gru’s new neighbor, herself an aspiring supervillain. We have just the slightest bits of Stephen Colbert and Chloe Fineman, and Steve Coogan. It’s baffling to me what made these actors want to pursue this project. I guess when the money is good, what does it matter if literally all of the dialogue is terrible?

Chris Renaud, who directed this franchise’s previous installments, returns here. It’s more of an Illumination Entertainment thing than a Chris Renaud thing, but I absolutely despise the way these movies look. The character design is so punishingly ugly and everything is bright and assaultive colors that looks like a bag of Skittles vomited on the screen. The music choices are appalling, there are so many current top 40 hits that seem to be here for no reason except a child in the audience might react because it’s something they’ve heard before. Like I said, there are a million side-plots going on here, and there is one lone bit that kind of works. That involves a recurring sight gag of a minion who is caught in a vending machine. That’s it. Literally one running gag didn’t make me want to die.

I would say you could do worse than to take your children to Despicable Me 4 on a hot summer afternoon, but considering the other options available to you right now, I’m not sure that is actually true. Despicable Me 4 is the epitome of lazy family filmmaking, and it feels like the most cynical cash-grab. They weren’t even trying here. Everything is cacophonous and shrill and exhausting. There is a bit near the end involving a reuniting of characters from previous installments of this franchise. And this is the kind of thing franchise movies like this do to nostalgia-bait. And I don’t know if anyone has nostalgia for the Despicable Me franchise. Do any of these movies matter on a fundamental level to anyone older than, I don’t know, ten? It feels like we’re constantly grasping at straws and this franchise is only a franchise because it makes money. And because the moviegoing public can be comprised of maybe not the smartest people, I’m sure we’ll get another one of these sooner than later.