‘Minions & Monsters’ Review: Illumination Says “Bello” and “Banana” to Cinéastes with a Chaotic, Haphazard Spoof of Classic Hollywood [C+]

Few people can remain neutral about the Minions. The blobby, pestering mayhem machines have ruled children’s pop-culture entertainment for the better part of fifteen years — their high-pitched gibberish and wanton puerile antics a regular, round-the-clock staple in homes with toddlers; their outsized reactions and foolish expressions a reliable go-to for reaction GIFs in Microsoft Teams messages across office workspaces. For many, the Minions represent another stroke of Hollywood franchising genius. For plenty of others, few ideas are more unbearable than ninety minutes of the inane adventures of characters built entirely on nonsense.

For the latter camp, that distaste might be tempered somewhat by the mainline Despicable Me films, where those ceaseless antics are broken up by the slightly less stupid mischief of reformed supervillain Gru (Steve Carell) and his family, dastardly associates, and arch-nemeses. That’s not the case with the solo Minions spin-off franchise, which presents the troublemaking reprobates in full, undiluted glory — all the nonstop, frantic gags and “Bello”s and “Banana”s you could ever imagine.

Something is clearly working: Minions & Monsters is the third mainline Minions film, on top of four Despicable Me entries, a tally that’s only impressive until you factor in the countless shorts that animation studio Illumination has churned out to keep the franchise top-of-mind. It’s helmed by Pierre Coffin, who has built an entire career on these characters, having directed the first three Despicable Me films and the original Minions, so you know you’re in capable hands for a movie that basks in zany, frivolous mischief. But he and co-writer Brian Lynch, also an Illumination staple, go bigger and more high-concept here, suggesting a desire to elevate the simple buffoonery of these yellow idiots into something approaching genuine comedic depth, whatever that means in a movie where a Citizen Kane parody culminates in a Minion replacing the dramatic line “Rosebud” with “aw, poop.” 

Orson Welles’ totemic sound-era picture is far from the only classic film spoofed in the Minions’ (all voiced by Coffin) latest outing: the film takes advantage of the disturbing fact that the little destructive live-wires have apparently lived forever (and, alarmingly, seemingly cannot die) to have them disrupt the booming film business of 1920s Los Angeles. After a string of failed servant jobs for the likes of a cyclops (beating Christopher Nolan to the punch in putting The Odyssey on theater screens this year), a wizard from whom they steal a plot-essential magical book that summons monsters, and more, they crash-land in the middle of a film shoot after mistaking an actor playing an outlaw in a Western for a viable boss in their eternal quest for a supreme evil master. 

Respectable, monocle-adorned silent-film director Max (Christoph Waltz in a perfectly hammed-up portrayal of European transplants) is hysterical with anger and fear of his bosses over the little devils ruining his shoot until studio head honchos Frank and Elwood (both played by Jeff Bridges) become effusive about the film’s new direction and the Minions’ star-power viability, launching them to national fame and adoration. It’s not enough that the Minions have taken over our contemporary film landscape — now they’re megastars in films from a hundred years ago.

To that end, Minions & Monsters is filled with lighthearted, disordered caricatures and lampoons of dozens of films from the Golden Age and earlier, all dispersed without much rhyme or reason other than adhering to the movie’s theme. Kids will surely be delighted to see the likes of A Trip to the Moon, Modern Times, Safety Last!, Steamboat Bill, Jr., Casablanca, and more, rendered through the frivolous lens of Illumination’s anodyne, elastic, rounded animation style, despoiling the slapstick thrills of those original silent-film stars in recreation. It’s plenty random and disordered, but the tongue-in-cheek idea of the Minions enjoying their status as film industry superstars has a charmingly winking, if unavoidably self-aggrandizing, quality about it. At one point, a radio announcer declares that “the Minions have become the kings of the box office,” and that “Now there’s Minions merchandise! What will they think up next?” 

This may give Minions & Monsters a more specific angle for having the little guys carry a film, but that doesn’t mean the end result is any less erratic and cluttered than what’s come before. The script feels like two ideas smashed together: the movie about Minions in Old Hollywood and the movie about Minions conjuring monsters they have to fight. After escaping with the book of monsters early on, and with the newly introduced Minion James dead-set on making his own monster movie, he and a couple of cohorts invoke the presence of Goomi (Trey Parker), a miniature, Cthulhu-looking thing who deceives the Minions with his own aims of world destruction, under the guise of helping with the film.

The disparity in amusement between the Hollywood pastiche and the Minions saving the world from monsters they’ve accidentally unleashed is especially pronounced. When focused on the more familiar, generic spectacle of havoc and destruction by characters with dull, uninspired designs, the film draws out the worst of what Illumination has to offer. It’s not helped by the patchiness of the script — a B-plot that sees the remaining congregation of Minions helping an oddball resident dressed as a The Day the Earth Stood Still-style space robot named Dort (Jesse Eisenberg) as he tries to woo a suffragette activist named Debbie (Zoey Deutch) represents the worst of the company’s tendency toward abject dishevelment and disregard for any meaningful storytelling. Though, it is funny to eventually see the Minions marching through the street chanting “votes for women!”

And yet, when Minions & Monsters is focused on fancifully revising history to imbue it with 100% more Minionese, it carries an appealing affability. It’s a light burlesque take on Hollywood history that puts the characters in novel scenarios that will make film-history fans chuckle, such as when the poor Minions are put into their own version of Babylon as they get outmoded by the advent of sound and their nonsense speech just won’t cut it. Moreover, it champions, in its own dinky way, the art of filmmaking and the power of the communal theatrical experience. There’s a mordant irony in that message being delivered from theater screens projecting the most deliriously hyperactive edition of children’s entertainment, and while Illumination’s peers, Pixar, address more thoughtful notions of childhood and emotionality in the next auditorium over with Toy Story 5. But then perhaps that’s just the manifold power of cinema — from the Lumière brothers to the Minions, there’s nothing like the movies.

Grade: C+

Universal Pictures and Illumination will release Minions & Monsters only in theaters on July 1.

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