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Minions & Monsters (Film Review)

For a series that looked like it had settled into cruise control years ago, Minions & Monsters comes out swinging with a genuinely clever idea. Instead of dropping the Minions into another adventure with Gru, it sends an entirely different tribe back to the earliest days of Hollywood. In those early days, silent films are king. Moreover, nobody seems bothered that a bunch of yellow weirdos have wandered onto a movie set.

 

 

 

James pulls everything together. While the rest of the tribe spends its time hunting for the biggest, meanest boss they can find, he’s off sketching story ideas and daydreaming about making movies. Henry never questions any of it. He just grabs the camera and goes along for the ride. Ed quietly completes the trio, because of course he does.

Getting to Hollywood is half the fun. Every new master the Minions latch onto ends in spectacular failure, whether it’s a cyclops, a pirate, a wizard, or a mummy. One disaster rolls into the next. Eventually, a runaway train sends them crashing straight into a silent film production. 

Christoph Waltz plays poor Max, the director, watching years of careful planning explode in real time. Meanwhile, Jeff Bridges is having a blast voicing both Bright Brothers. These are two studio heads who mistake complete chaos for cinematic genius.

Pierre Coffin has been there from the beginning. This time he is directing alongside Patrick Delage. He is, once again, voicing every Minion, which is one of the stranger accomplishments in modern animation. Coffin remembers that their physical comedy is what made them instant fan favorites years ago. Moreover, dropping them into the silent era makes years of gibberish and slapstick feel like they were leading here all along.

Harold Lloyd, Buster Keaton, and Charlie Chaplin are all baked into the visual language, and the film often hangs a spotlight on every reference.

Brian Lynch’s screenplay picks up once the Minions become silent movie stars. They rise to stardom overnight. However, they lose everything when talking pictures arrive. Their nonsense language suddenly becomes a career-ending problem. However, James refuses to let it end there. If Hollywood won’t hire him anymore, he’ll just make his own monster movie.

Enter Trey Parker, voicing Goomi, a tiny green monster who’s charming enough that you immediately know you probably shouldn’t trust him. The narrative shifts away from old Hollywood and toward magical creatures, giant blobs, and world-ending chaos. It’s entertaining enough, but not nearly as interesting as the first half.

Then we have Dort. Jesse Eisenberg leans into his usual anxious delivery to an awkward, would-be alien conqueror. Dort also forms an unexpected romance with Debbie, voiced by Zoey Deutch. There’s plenty of personality. However, the entire storyline never quite earns the amount of screen time it gets. Every time the movie wandered back to them, I wanted to return to James and Henry trying to scrape together their impossible little movie.

None of that changes how good the film looks. Illumination has become incredibly confident with this style of animation. Little background jokes keep popping up and the action always remains easy to follow no matter how chaotic things become. 

The music deserves some credit too, composed by John Powell. It starts with the playful energy of old silent-film accompaniment before gradually opening into a much bigger orchestral adventure. It might be the best score in the series thus far.

The second half never quite reaches the same highs as the first, but it’s still only slightly passable. I was more captivated by just how strange the whole endeavour is, which overall didn’t make me laugh frequently, but I was never bored, which might be something because I honestly wasn’t expecting much going in. 

James chasing a movie instead of a villain gives this franchise a reason to exist beyond another round of Minion antics.