Who would’ve thought that a film series about so-called ‘despicable’ characters would
end up being so popular? Since the franchise began in 2010, “Despicable Me” has taken
the world by storm. With two sequels, a spinoff series, several shorts and a ton of
merchandise, the Despicable Me universe has certainly made a name for itself. But out
of all of these heroes and villains, which are the most noble and which ones are TRULY
despicable? I’m Brad with Wicked Binge,
and this is Despicable Me: Good to Evil.
As always, we’ll be starting our list with the most pure characters and working our way
down. These characters are the Good.
Starting this list, we have the innocent and absolutely adorable Agnes. As far as little kid
characters go, she’s one of the sweetest as well as one of the most pure. When she first
meets Gru, Agnes immediately forms an attachment to him, trusting him
whole-heartedly despite her sisters still having doubts. She also fully trusts the Minions
and treats them well, telling them thank you after they get her a homemade unicorn toy.
Though she doesn’t grow or develop much over the course of the film series, it could be
argued that she doesn’t really need to. While she is a bit naive about some things, like
the existence of unicorns, Agnes can be quite mature about other things. In the secondmovie,
when Gru dressed up as a fairy princess for her birthday party, she let him know
that while she knew it was him, she still appreciated his efforts. Then, in the third movie,
after learning that Gru and Lucy had lost their jobs, Agnes was willing to sell her beloved
unicorn plushie just to help the family raise money. While she hasn’t done as much in
the way of heroic deeds compared to other characters, we really can’t deny that she has
a pure heart and truly deserves the Gold Medal of Good.
In second place, we have Lucy, the super-spy extraordinaire and eventual wife and
mother to Gru and the Girls. Lucy is tough but quirky. She’s pretty excitable when it
comes to her job, but she’s also quite caring and kind. When she sees that Gru is on an
awful date and is about to be humiliated, she tranquilizes his date. Maybe not the most
morally correct response but, hey, Gru definitely appreciated it. As a member of the
Anti-Villain League, she’s naturally very much on the side of good, even convincing Gru
to join AVL with her and fight off other villains. She also helps Gru open up, being a good
listener as well as supportive. Lucy also tries her best to be a good mother to the girls,
and although we see her making mistakes - like forcing Margo to dance with a boy and
accidentally getting her engaged - she always tries to correct these mistakes and will
not hesitate to stand up for her girls and protect them from danger. As far as the heroes
of this series go, we feel there’s no one more heroic than Lucy.
Following her, we have Margo. Out of the three sisters, Margo was the most skeptical of
Gru, and would often be the one to push him into doing what she and her sisters
wanted, being snarky when he tried to tell her the rules of the house and refusing to do
his cookie scheme until he took them to their dance class. But, after Gru rescued them
from Vector and proved that he could be a good dad, Margo definitely came around. She
can be the most mature and level-headed out of her sisters but, given that she’s still a
pre-teen, she has her moments of immaturity. Even so, she’s protective of her younger
sisters, often leading them out of trouble and caring deeply about them and their
parents. Next, we have the last of the sisters,
Edith. Definitely the most mischievous and the most spunky of the three. In fact,
out of all the girls, she’s the most likely to follow her
father’s villainous footsteps. In the first movie, after Gru destroys the carnival game,
Agnes wants him to destroy other games just for fun, and in the second film, she’s
actively training to be a ninja and Gru has to remind her not to kill anyone. That was
proooobably meant as a joke, but still. Like Margo, she can sometimes be a bit bratty
and snarky. She’s seen playing pranks on Dru’s butler and likes to sometimes tease and
scare her sisters, but thankfully it never gets to the point of her straight-up bullying
them. In fact, when Agnes finds a one-horned goat in the third movie and believes that it's
a unicorn, Edith decides to let her believe that, not wanting to burst her bubble. While
her tendency to enjoy violence and her father’s weapons is a bit concerning, she only
ever fights for her family, which definitely makes her a good guy in our eyes.
Finishing up the main family, we have Gru. Probably the character in the series with the
most complicated morality scale, to the point where depending on which deeds you
focus on, so could make a case for him to be placed in ANY of our categories. He
happily starts out as a villain, and has been a villain since he was 8, after stealing an
already stolen crown from Scarlet Overkill. Since then, he’s tried to make a name for
himself as a villain, stealing landmarks from Vegas and New York and eventually trying
to steal the moon. He also casually does evil in his day-to-day life, like freezing people
just to make things more convenient for himself when he gets coffee. Although he
treats his minions decently, Gru tended to use people for his own means - like when he
was willing to adopt a trio of little girls just to use as pawns for a scheme. This is all
pretty awful, but throughout the series, we see Gru develop and grow as both a
character and a father. Once he starts to care about his daughters, Gru not only protects
them from harm, but does everything a good father should do - from playing with them
and making them personalized breakfasts to comforting and encouraging them when
they’re sad. Gru is even willing to stop being a villain for his daughter’s sake, and later
fully joins the Anti-Villain League. So far, he’s managed to stop and defeat three villains -
not bad for a former baddie. Even so, as much good as he’s done and as much love he
has for his family, Gru can still do some morally ambiguous things. He can still be a bit
of a jerk and pretty rude towards strangers or people he doesn’t care about. But even so,
he refused to return to villainy in the third movie - not out of any moral reason, but
because he didn’t want his family to get caught up in that dangerous lifestyle. Overall,
Gru has changed a ton, and while he may not be the most pure or heroic guy,
he’s still a good dad and husband who is trying his best not to be so ‘despicable’ these days.
Wrapping up the good, next is Silas Ramsbottom. Silas is the head of the Anti-Villain
League, an organization that primarily focuses on stopping supervillains from causing
massive devastation with their schemes. That in itself is a pretty heroic thing, but how is
Silas as a person. Well, while the work he does is good, Silas is often a bit
condescending and somewhat of a pompous jerk. He makes fun of Gru's jam and jellies
business and when he tells Gru that Silas that Lucy is being reassigned to Australia, he
does it in a pretty harsh and cold way. Granted, Silas probably didn’t know about Gru’s
feelings for Lucy yet, but still. What keeps Silas out of the Grey Area is that he only ever
acts this way towards Gru - which, given Gru’s history, is a bit understandable. However,
we never see him act this way towards Lucy or any of the other AVL agents, and while
we may not see him out in the field stopping villains, running a whole agency is nothing
to sneeze at. So, we feel he does enough to rank in the Good.
That does it for the good guys, now it’s time to delve into the more neutral. This is the
Grey Area. Starting off this section, we have Dru
in a spot that we’re sure would disappoint him. Simply put, Dru is a wannabe villain. Having grown
up with their villainous father, all Dru wants is to be great like his father was.
Unfortunately, when it comes to pulling off evil schemes, he’s a bit too dopey to be a real
threat. When he and Gru start to bond, he tricks Gru into stealing a diamond for evil’s sake
instead of returning it, and tries to push his brother into being evil again despite
Gru’s insisting that he doesn’t want to be evil anymore. This is what causes a brief falling
out between them. Thankfully, Dru steps up when his brother and nieces are in danger,
and he even destroys Balthazar Bratt's giant robot to save Gru. Although he still insists
on being a supervillain in the end, he and Gru are friendly with each other despite now being
on opposite sides, viewing the whole thing as a sort of ‘cat-and-mouse’ game
rather than anything serious. Because of his happy-go-lucky nature and his lack of success
when it comes to actual villainy, we’re tentatively putting him in the grey, and are
hopeful that, even as a technical villain, he can remain a decent guy.
Next, we’re ranking all of the Minions. Now we know that there have been several
named Minions, with three of them even taking a starring role in the spinoff movie. Still,
while some may be a bit more innocent while others are a bit more bratty, they all have
similar enough personalities and motives that we feel we should group them together.
The Minions are, well, Minions! All they want is to serve the most evil person they can
find and help them cause destruction. Unfortunately, they have a bad habit of
accidentally killing their masters, with Scarlet and Gru being the only ones to survive.
Funnily enough, Gru has also brought out their good side. The Minions show kindness
and protectiveness towards Gru and the Girls, and seem to truly want to help them and
make them happy. Still, these guys can be pretty chaotic and destructive, and unlike Gru
who has firmly turned his back away from evil, the Minions sometimes miss doing evil
and even briefly leave him because of this desire in the third movie. Given how child-like the
Minions are and how easily they can do good OR evil depending on their mood or
the person they’re trying to save/defeat, we can’t really call them straight-up villains. As
far as we’re concerned, these guys are practically the definition of chaotic neutral.
Keeping in line with Gru’s henchmen, we have Dr. Nefario. Like the Minions, Dr. Nefario
is more focused on evil than Gru is. Unlike the Minions, however, who soften up to the
Girls, Nefario only ever seemed to see them as nuisances. When he thought that Gru
was getting too attached and was better off without them, he actually called the
orphanage to take the girls away. While he did help Gru get them back in the end and
now considers the girls part of the family, he never apologized for this. In the second
movie, he quits working for Gru, again feeling unsatisfied in his work and frustrated that
Gru now cares more about being a father than a villain. When he teams up with El
Macho and agrees to help him take over the world by creating a serum that makes the
Minions go rabid. Thankfully, Nefario once again realizes his mistake and creates an
antidote for the serum, helping the Gru family save the day. Although it’s clear that he
cares about Gru and tries to stand by him and make
things right, that doesn’t really excuse all the wrong that he’s done.
We can’t put him in the Bad Tier, since he could certainly be a lot more heartless, but we feel
that he’s still fairly far from being a good guy. In what may be an unconventional pick,
we’re ranking The Nelsons next. In the Minions spinoff movie, the Nelsons are the ones who pick
the Minions up when they’re trying to hitchhike to Villain-Con. Being a family
of villains themselves, the Nelsons do fun family activities like robbing banks and getting
into car chases with police, even actively shooting missiles at them! So, as self-proclaimed
villains, what keeps them from being in the Bad Tier? Well, similarly to Gru,
though they may do bad things, they’re still an openly loving family and care about each other,
like when Mr. and Mrs. Nelson comfort their daughter Tina for accidentally
tripping the alarm during a robbery instead of scolding her for it. The Nelsons are also very
kind towards the Minions, not only offering them a ride but also fresh apple slices,
and when Scarlet orders the capture of the Minions, they're the only villains that don't
go after them. The dad even tells the Minions to run for it. We still can’t exactly call them
‘good’ characters given that they actively commit crimes, but when compared to other villains
on this list - ones who are truly heartless - they’re
definitely the best of the bad. On the very edge of grey, we’re placing
Herb Overkill, husband to Scarlet Overkill. While Scarlet is the one committing the crimes,
Herb is the supportive accomplice and inventor, providing his wife and the
Minions with all the gadgets they could ever need. Herb is a loving and doting husband to Scarlet,
never being jealous of her success and always supporting her and telling her how
much he admires her. He’s also friendly with the Minions, and even when he’s ordered to
torture them, he ends up playing around and having fun with them. Really, while it can be
said that he does enable Scarlet’s evil deeds and the inventions he creates
are truly destructive in the wrong hands, Herb is really too nice of a guy to be labeled as bad,
always seen as laid back and chill. Finally, we’ve come to the truly villainous
and the wicked. These characters are the Bad to Evil.
As awful as she can be, we have to put Marlena (Gru’s Mother) on the lower end of bad.
Compared to Gru and Lucy, Marlena was a pretty awful parent. At best, she was harsh,
and at worse, she was emotionally abusive. Marlena never seemed to support or
encourage Gru, always criticizing him and making Gru feel like he had to impress her.
Even when Gru is all grown up, her attitude towards him never really changes. She’s
either criticizing and vaguely insulting him, or ignoring him to spend time with her
various exercise instructors. What’s worse is for his whole life, she never told him that
he had a twin brother. What keeps her from being put any lower is that, while she wasn’t
that great of a parent, she seems to be a decent grandmother towards the girls in the
one scene she shares with them. She also told Gru at the end of the first movie that he
was a good parent, though not as good as her. It’s not much, but it’s something.
Next is Miss Hattie, the head of the orphanage. Like with Marlena, it’s not any good side
that keeps Miss Hattie from the top, but rather everyone else on this list is somehow
much worse. Miss Hattie rules her orphanage with an iron fist. She’s cruel,
condescending, bossy and is constantly reminding the girls that she doesn’t even LIKE
children, only seeing the orphans she takes care of as a means to sell her cookies.
When they don’t sell enough cookies, she sticks them in a “Box of Shame”. She also
seems to taunt the girls hoping for an adopted family. When Agnes asks if anyone’s
come in to adopt them, Miss Hattie tells her no in the harshest way possible. This
woman doesn’t have any nice sides, and what truly makes her frustrating is that she
never even gets punished for being such an awful person. But, while we wish we could
put her higher up, we must acknowledge that although Miss Hattie isn’t winning any
humanitarian awards anytime, at least she’s never tried to kill people or take over the
world.
We’re ranking El Macho next. Thought to be dead after going out in the most manly way
possible, El Macho has both brains and brawns and has been called a “complete
powerhouse of a man”. He faked his death and went undercover as a restaurant owner
just so he could plan his biggest scheme yet, trying to take over the world with rabid
Minions, and was even smart enough to frame another person in the mall when he
suspected the Anti-Villain League was on his tail. In his youth, he’d frequently rob
armored trucks, being strong enough to easily lift them up, and focused on being as
manly and ‘macho’ as possible. Despite all this, El Macho is actually a fairly decent guy.
As a civilian, he’s friendly towards Gru and his daughters, consoled Gru when he was
sad about Lucy leaving, and even seems like a pretty alright father to his own son,
supporting his and Margo’s relationship with each other. He also loves his pet chicken.
Unfortunately, most of this good will goes straight out the window when he sics his
rabid Minions on Gru after Gru refuses his offer to help him take over the world and ties
Lucy to a rocket that’s set to go into a volcano.
It just goes to show that even a nice villain is still a villain at heart.
Up next is the villainous Vector. He’s nerdy and immature, priding himself on being a
so-called ‘modern’ villain thanks to his extraordinary tech. He absolutely LOVES to
show-off, and seems to do things like steal the Pyramid of Giza just to brag about it.
He’s also not afraid to steal ideas from other villains like Gru, making him seem all the
more petty. This extends to strangers, given that he was willing to vaporize the girls for
trespassing when all they were trying to do was sell cookies. What makes him cross the
line from annoying antagonist to a true threat is when he kidnaps the girls in exchange
for the shrunken moon. He then refuses to return the girls, and nearly causes Margo to
fall to her death. Unlike El Macho, he doesn’t seem to have any good sides. However,
given how dumb and oblivious he can sometimes be and how threatening our next two
entries are, we have to put him at number three. In second place, we have Balthazar Bratt.
Balthazar started out as a former child star. He played a child villain in a very popular
80s show called "Evil Bratt." But, when he hit puberty and was no longer cute and charming,
he became a has-been at 15. So, as a means to get revenge on the world and
fans that turned against him, Bratt became a real supervillain. Surprisingly, Balthazar
was actually pretty good at being a villain, becoming the AVL’s Most Wanted. Using his
80s themed gadgets, we see him take out all the security on a yacht, outsmart and
humiliate Gru, and steal an extremely valuable diamond - with the implication that this is about
on par with all of his other schemes and grand escapes. Despite his goofy
appearance, Balthazar rivals nearly every other villain in the franchise in terms of danger and
threat levels. Later on, after Gru and Dru steal his diamond, Balthazar tops himself
by not only kidnapping the girls, but unleashing a giant robot to terrorize Hollywood
before lifting it up into space. Yeah, this guy is pretty nuts. He also nearly kills Gru
and Dru, and is only defeated when one of his weapons is used against him. Balthazar
easily could have been named our Most Evil character. However, despite all his success,
we feel that his bratty personality and petty motivations make him just a tiny-bit less evil
and impressive than our number one pick. And speaking of whichWe’re giving Scarlet
Overkill our Gold Metal of Evil. One of the greats, Scarlet was nearly
the Queen of Villainy, if not for the Minions and later a young Gru taking her out once
and for all. Being known as the world’s number 1 villain, her talent for evil is obvious,
with her having started an entire criminal empire by the time she turned 13. Though she
can put on a nice and sweet facade, Scarlet is extremely ambitious and will do whatever
it takes to reach her goals. This includes stealing, taking hostages, and attempted
murder. She also hates to be shown up. Although the Minions technically did what she
asked of them, stealing the Queen’s Crown, the fact that Bob was made ruler and
ultimately stole her glory was enough to infuriate her and make her want to see the trio
of Minions tortured and killed. Even before this, she heavily implied that her kindness
towards the Minions was conditional, and if they did anything wrong or stupid, she
would “blow them off the face of the Earth”. Like El Macho, Scarlet does have one good
quality in that she has someone she cares unconditionally about, her husband Herb. But
even with this small hint of goodness, after looking at all the success Scarlet has had as
a villain, how much destruction she caused in her life, and all the danger she put the
Minions through in an attempt to kill them once and for all, we just have
to rank Scarlet Overkill as the Most Evil character in the Despicable Me franchise.
But who do you think the most Good and Evil characters are? Let us know in the
comment section below. Be sure to hit that notification bell and binge our Good to Evil
playlist. Where we break down the morality of the characters in your favorite cartoons,
shows and movies. But most importantly, stay wicked!