Hailing from another world, Megamind (voiced by Will Ferrell) feels as if he and his best fishy friend Minion (voiced by David Cross) had been forced into a life of evil since the moment they crash-landed on Earth. They were always belittled and put down by a fellow, much more human looking and far more powerful interstellar visitor, a being who later in his life would become known as Metro Man (voiced by Brad Pitt), protector of Metro City.

Roxanne Ritchi and Megamind chat in Megamind © DreamWorks

Now the pair’s epic struggle between good and evil has come to an end. After capturing television newswoman Roxanne Ritchi (voiced by Tina Fey), Megamind has somehow won, discovering Metro Man’s one weakness by chance and thus destroying him. But being an all-powerful completely in control of everything supervillain isn’t all it’s cracked up to be, and soon the big blue-headed alien finds himself bored.

What happens next isn’t anything important. The only thing a person needs to know is that ideas that seem good on paper aren’t great in execution, and that even the baddest bad guy can have a heart of a gold used for truth, justice and all that other stuff if the chips start falling the proper way. Heroes will be villains and villains thusly heroes, right and might not always the same thing especially when one’s conscience sees the light of day.

Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. All you really need to know about Megamind is that it isn’t very good, is seldom very funny and is so drowning in explosions and destruction one sort of half-heartedly wonders if letting children watch it is a good idea. The script has a decent idea at its core but doesn’t have a clue what to do with it, the vocal cast all seem to be coming from different angles and the movie itself is a heavy-handed mess that never makes its points in a way that is neither refreshing or clear. It is a loud, mostly visually unappealing cacophony of sound and fury signifying very little, director Tom McGrath (who previously made the Madagascar films, both of which I liked) unable to balance the miscellaneous tangents in order to assemble them into a final product that would at least be palatable.

It doesn’t help that this movie looks like almost every other DreamWorks release since Shrek hit the screen back in 2001. Unlike their rivals at Pixar, the studio doesn’t seem to care that every one of their pictures has the same visual style as their previous ones, and while I’m not saying the quality of the animation is bad what I am stating is that the ingenuity going on within it certainly is.

I will also say matters aren’t improved by the fact, in many ways, Megamind plays like nothing more than a defacto sequel to the studio’s 2009 hit Monsters vs. Aliens. But it’s all of the bad parts of that film and none of the good, amplifying the destruction levels to meteoric heights making me cringe in my theatre seat as I was forced to witness them. There’s none of that previous effort's charm or whimsy, the character-driven nuance of it all but left out in the cold. All that’s left is the sound and the fury, the whole movie nothing more than a one-dimensional monster mash where no building is to big to crumble and no structure to gigantic to be blown to smithereens.

Which brings me to the characters themselves. After a while I came to the belief that Ferrell, Fey, Pitt, Cross and Jonah Hill (whom I usually love but here borderline hated) were all working at cross-purposes. None of them seemed to be on the same page, all doing their own thing hoping that somehow it would connect to the voice tracks the others had already laid down. While sparks sometimes happen (mostly thanks to the almost effortless talents of Fey), and while certain ideas are downright sensational (Ferrell’s Brando-meets-mumblecore impersonation had me close to being in stitches), it's not enough to make even the brighter bits resonate like they could have.

Pity, because I do like the central idea behind Megamind. What would happen if the supervillain did finally win? How would they respond to ultimate power with the knowledge no one ever again would stand against them? It’s a curious concept, and one worthy of a better movie than this, DreamWorks dropping the ball easily crafting one of the more disappointing animated spectacles of this or any other year.