The beloved—but unintelligible—Minions lose their status as Hollywood icons with the advent of sound in 1920s Hollywood in Minions & Monsters, now playing in Prague cinemas in both Czech-dubbed and original English-language versions (English screenings currently limited to Cinema City Nový Smíchov). This third Minions movie and seventh in the Despicable Me Cinematic Universe is scattershot in terms of story but pure joy in concept.
Once again directed by Pierre Coffin—who also co-writes and voices the Minions—Minions & Monsters doubles down on the franchise’s anarchic energy, but also makes its boldest formal leap yet: a full-blown love letter to early cinema. The result is frequently inspired, occasionally overstuffed, and ultimately split between cinephile delight and familiar franchise fatigue.
After a bit of the usual Minions-in-search-of-a-boss trope, Minions & Monsters inexplicably delivers its heroes into the birth of cinema itself with an endearing early montage that invokes the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train, Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr., and more classics with an enthusiasm that borders on academic.
Coffin leans heavily into silent-era physical comedy, and for a stretch, the film becomes something unexpectedly joyous: a chaotic but loving reconstruction of cinema history filtered through the Minions’ trademark gibberish logic. In extended moments, the film is pure cinephile indulgence disguised as children’s animation.
Minions & Monsters’s central conceit—that the Minions rise to silent-era stardom before being undone by the arrival of sound cinema due to their unintelligible language—adds a surprisingly elegant thematic twist. The Minions’ garbled dialogue is treated as a genuine studio problem, forcing executives (a pair of mountainous siblings voiced by Jeff Bridges) to confront the limits of their newfound stars. It is a delightfully absurd idea, reimagining Damien Chazelle‘s Babylon through banana-colored chaos.
But while the film’s cinematic obsession is its greatest strength, its narrative structure proves considerably less assured. Unlike the tighter throughlines of earlier entries—including the first, where Kevin, Stuart, and Bob pursued a boss across increasingly elaborate set pieces—Minions & Monsters largely abandons cohesion in favor of episodic vignettes.
The Minions’ search for a new master still drives part of the story, eventually leading them to Jesse Eisenberg’s robotic would-be conqueror Dort, but this thread competes with a parallel storyline involving James, Henry, and Ed, three Minions who reject servitude altogether after being inspired by filmmaker Max (Christoph Waltz) to create their own monster movie.
The trio accidentally unleashes a series of creatures—including the baby Cthulu Goomi (Trey Parker) and later the world-ending blob Irene—while attempting to turn their cinematic ambitions into reality in classic Hollywood. It’s a premise that allows Coffin and co-writer Brian Lynch to escalate the film into increasingly chaotic territory, but it also underscores the lack of a single, streamlined narrative engine. The result is less a story than a sequence of escalating ideas, some more fully developed than others.
And yet, for all its structural looseness, Minions & Monsters maintains a surprising baseline of invention. Even when the story fractures into competing arcs, the film rarely stops being visually playful. John Powell’s score gives the proceedings an added propulsion, while the animation repeatedly finds inventive ways to stage silent-era pastiche alongside modern blockbuster spectacle. There is a genuine sense of affection for cinema history running through the entire production, even when the storytelling cannot quite contain it.
If anything, the film’s biggest limitation is that it eventually runs out of structural discipline to match its ideas. The final act collapses into familiar animated chaos, with large-scale monster battles and world-saving antics that feel less inventive than the earlier Hollywood-set material. The shift is noticeable: what begins as a clever meditation on early film history gradually drifts back toward standard franchise escalation.
The Prague Reporter has committed the previous two Minions films to memory thanks to a 4-year-old son who now rates Minions & Monsters as the best in the series, thanks largely to the addition of a colorful bevy of new creatures. This author is inclined to agree, if only for all the irresistible old Hollywood and classic cinema references that make it a lot of fun for cinephiles; in strictly narrative terms, however, this one is the weakest in the trilogy.
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