Movie Review: Minions & Monsters

PHOENIX (AZFamily) — Lights, camera, BANANA!!!

Synopsis

Taking place in the 1920s, Minions & Monsters follows Minions James and Henry (both voiced by Pierre Coffin), misfits of their own clan who are in search of a new villain to lead them. A series of misadventures lands them in Hollywoodland, where they quickly rise to stardom in silent films directed by Max (Christoph Waltz). James quickly develops a skill for filmmaking, and after he and all the other Minions lose their jobs after the advent of sound on film, he sets out to make a giant monster movie that has the danger of becoming all too real.

My thoughts

I was pretty harsh with my assessment of Illumination’s Despicable Me and Minions films in my review for Despicable Me 4, but hey, I stand by my reasons. They’re broad, silly, mostly thoughtless animated films that could be offering better entertainment for families, but who am I to say? Despicable Me 4 nearly made $1 billion, so parents and their kids clearly love all the bright lights and silly noises with barely any story. I get it. I was young, too, once.

However, Minions & Monsters has a great hook: it takes place during the Golden Age of Hollywood, and with the word Monsters also being part of the title, things were shaping up to be a celebration of the history of film with a giant kaiju battle at the end and all. What we get instead is a film of two distinct halves, one Minions and one Monsters, with the former surprisingly being more entertaining and exciting than the latter.

Going Hollywood(land)

Not being the biggest fan of the Despicable Me franchise, I must admit that I really enjoyed the first half of Minions & Monsters. It was a great send-up to the early days of Hollywood that I found very entertaining. Featuring loads of old-school references to all the usual suspects like Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, Harold Lloyd, and many more, the Minions’ ingratiating themselves into the movie industry made for a fun “what if” alternate history of the early days of Hollywood. There’s even a black vignette around the frame to really echo the era.

The Minions are like Looney Tunes characters in the sense that you can put them in any scenario and mine some comedy out of it. The idea of them being involved with some of the most iconic moments in film history is a great breeding ground for all sorts of gags, like a Minion acting as the moon in Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon, getting a solid laugh out of me. Writer-director Pierre Coffin, co-director Patrick Delage, and co-writer Brian Lynch struck a fine balance where Minions & Monsters feels both irreverent and celebratory.

Minions & Monsters is also a bold and risky animated kids’ movie at times. There’s barely any English in the first 30 minutes, although you can still get a good sense of what the Minions say in their language. The slapstick violence is in full force, with one human character straight up being decapitated onscreen (sans blood), as well as a woman slapping a Minion and calling him a “bastard” during a film noir bit. The one mean Minion is even named Dick, so Coffin, Delage, and Lynch certainly push the PG rating here.

I was actually thinking during the first half of the movie that this would be a fun movie to play during the last class of a film school semester as a cheeky way to celebrate it and sum it all up. Sadly, the second half completely falls off and mostly loses sight of what the movie is intended to be: a love letter to filmmaking and the Golden Age of Hollywood. Once the talkies come around and Minions find themselves on the streets without jobs, as nobody understands their nonsensical gibberish, most of the charm quickly vanishes.

This is where the Monsters bit of the title comes into play as James, Henry, and their Minion companion Ed summon the baby Cthulu-like monster known as Goomi (Trey Parker), who can help with getting giant monsters for their new movie. Meanwhile, Dick and the rest of the Minions begin following alien robot Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a nod to Gort in The Day the Earth Stood Still, as their new villainous leader. Minions & Monsters comes to a screeching halt during all this as we bounce back and forth between these equally dull A and B plots.

The motivation of Minions

I shouldn’t be too surprised, as these Despicable Me movies rarely ever have actual plots, but it’s frustrating that they have decent beginnings and endings. Yet, the creatives involved don’t connect these two points in any sort of emotionally gratifying way. Despicable Me 4 was pretty bad, but the final musical number is one of the best scenes in the entire franchise. I can see the purpose in the resolution here, talking about how amazing the feeling of having a theater filled with an excited audience watching your film is. Still, it would have been nice if the entire story were more emotionally focused in that direction.

At least the resolution livens things up with a fun homage to old sci-fi films like The Blob and Plan 9 from Outer Space, where the Minions fight a giant blob covered in eyeballs known as Irene, but so much of it feels like an afterthought. All of this happens so late into the narrative that it comes off as an obligation to live up to the Monsters part of the title, but then just don’t call the movie that? The identity crisis is real as it devolves into jumbled noise and color, being as exhausting as it is tedious.

The voice cast is mostly doing a fine job. Pierre Coffin’s performance as the various Minions is actually pretty impressive, with how he’s able to give some of them distinct personalities through all the lightning-fast Minionese. Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, and Zoey Deutch adequately read their lines, but otherwise don’t put in too much effort. Jeff Bridges is the only one giving his two roles some character, and George Lucas, who voices himself in a cameo role, is unironically one of the best performances in this.

Trey Parker is totally uninspired in his performance as Goomi, though. He already voiced the bad guy in Despicable Me 3, where he did a great job, so I’m not sure why they decided to bring him back for another villain role. He’s totally phoning it in here, in the way only Trey Parker can, simply doing a spin on the memberberries voice from South Park. Goomi is a pretty lame antagonist overall and represents one of the many chaotic parts in the second half of Minions & Monsters that drags it down.

In the same way that Illumination’s Super Mario films are light on the plot and heavy on the references for all the Nintendo fanboys, film enthusiasts are probably going to have a lot to enjoy with Minions & Monsters. The cute little references were enough to satiate my film school student brain in the first half, but those Super Mario movies sustain themselves for the entire runtime, whereas this just gradually runs out of steam.

Final verdict

Minions & Monsters may be the only installment in the entire Despicable Me franchise that feels like a missed opportunity. A part of me admires and respects how much of a love letter it acts as to the entire art form of film; there’s a heart and passion here, but it gets lost in the Illumination of it all. Regardless, kids are going to love it, and the parents will get the opportunity for a nice nap when it gets boring in the second half.

It’s fine for what it is, where if you enjoy the little yellow guys causing mischief without much rhyme or reason to it all, but they could have done so much more with the film history aspect. The amount of money these movies make shows the parents and kids clearly don’t care about the plot, so why not go all in on the insanity? What’s the point of restraining yourself? Minions on old Hollywood movie sets were good enough. Did we really need the Monsters, too?

My rating: 5.5/10

Minions & Monsters will be released in theaters nationwide on Wed, July 1.

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