Coffin literally places his star Minions, Henry and James, in a movie museum next to George Lucas, where Allison Janney voices a tour guide who provides the framing device for this historical yarn. As she tells a group of unruly kids, in the old days, Minion tribes roamed the planet searching for evil masters to serve — no wonder they ended up in Hollywood, right?
After stints with a cyclops, wizard, mummy, king, samurai, etc., this crew of Minions barrels into the Hollywood of the 1920s on a runaway train, where they become movie stars, taken under the wing of a movie director named Max (Christoph Waltz), who works for oversized super producers the Bright Brothers (Jeff Bridges). It’s a heady, wild, decadent and debauched time (see also, Damien Chazelle’s “Babylon”), until the advent of sound. Much like Lina Lamont in “Singin’ in the Rain,” the Minions can’t make the leap, and end up out on the street.
Henry, James and Ed pursue their dream of making James’ monster movie, while the rest of the gang team up with Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a friendly alien robot who’d like to take over the planet. Big dreamer James is like any aspiring young filmmaker — blindly driven to the point of ignoring every red flag that comes his way. He and his pals want to conjure up a kaiju from their old wizard’s spell book for the movie, but end up manifesting scheming monster Goomi (Trey Parker), who becomes a classic smarmy producer talking out of both sides of his mouth. The monster pals Goomi summons are liable to destroy everything, including a giant, all-consuming orange blob covered in eyeballs named Irene (Eye-rene?).
Choose your own metaphorical adventure with the lovely Irene, a monster whose only motivation is to mindlessly devour. Does she represent corporate mergers and monopolies that swallow up every creator and craftsperson in her wake? Or is does she represent the kind of (dumb) artificial intelligence that consumes a whole town and industry, leaving us with only mass surveillance and nothing of use? Why not both?
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