It Doesn’t Suck
The Minions are officially long in the tooth, but the latest meta origin story has its moments.
Minions & MOnsters
Director: Pierre Coffin • Writers: Brian Lynch, Pierre Coffin
Starring [English]: Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges
USA • 1hr 30mins
Opens Hong Kong July 1 • I
Grade: B
Full disclosure, I am not a Minions fan. From the moment the pill-shaped, banana eating (?) merchandise machines appeared in Despicable Me back in 2010 I’ve found them to be nothing more than insufferable product, precision-engineered to bolster ancillary revenues for the franchise, already inexplicably racking up US$5.5 billion, with a “B” in ticket sales and spawning short films, television series, video games and amusement park rides. Clearly, I am a voice in the wilderness.
In Minions & Monsters, the seventh film in the Despicable franchise and the third stand-alone Minions movie, director Pierre Coffin – who voices the Minions in their bizarre Italo-Spanish yammering, which now includes flashes of Japanese, Chinese and I think Hindi – and co-writer Brian Lynch have found a way for the Minions to be not quite so aggravating, focusing in on a just a couple of the yellow blobs and concocting an amusing, meta adventure about how the Minions travelled the world looking for the ideal villainous Big Boss to serve, at one point landing in Hollywood of the 1920s. Film nerd parents will get the movie in-jokes – many admittedly excellent – But Minions & Monsters is entirely unnecessary, critic-proof summer family fare, and if you love the Minions, you’ll love this.
A cast of thousands
The central figures this time around are James and Henry, and to a degree their sole ally Ed, vaguely pariah Minions for their repeated sabotage of successful stints with supervillains, James in particular who’s also a natural born storyteller. Fate leads them to a Los Angeles film set in the late ’20s (do not dig into the historical timeline) and a ruinous train robbery take for a filmmaker, Max (Christoph Waltz), who chases them off the studio backlot. Naturally he has to get them back when the studio bosses (Jeff Bridges) loves what the Minions did and makes them instant movies stars.
In the meantime, James, Henry and Ed have ordained themselves keepers of a book of magic spells that they use to summon a great monster for their great monster move – the movie they’ve decided to make themselves after getting run off the lot a second time. They summon Goomi (South Park’s Trey Parker), some weird-ass discount Cthulhu thing with ulterior motives that immediately tries to eat Los Angeles. The Minions save the day – duh – make a hit movie and turn out to be the reason the sign on the hill no longer says “Hollywoodland”. Also, the unofficial leader of the Minions is a dick. He’s called Dick, and when a movie museum tour guide (Allison Janney) telling the story says his name it’s hilarious every single time.
Minions & Monsters is by no means a masterpiece of animated filmmaking, nor does it really add anything to the Minions lore that we need to know; it’s on rinse and repeat as it Forrest Gumps their asses into silent-era Hollywood. But oddly enough the Hollywood angle really serves the story this time, even if kids (who were thoroughly amused in my screening by the way) are unlikely to clock the Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles, Damien Chazelle’s Babylon (!), Universal monsters and the advent of sound gags. Illumination has done this kind of industrial in-joking before, in its Sing, but never with this level of abandon, which occasionally tips into just icky. Yes, that was a butt plug joke. Huh?
Still, Minions & Monsters is more fun than not, at least by Minions standards, and it’s hard to dunk on a film that has a killer George Lucas gag in it, with the blessing of Lucas himself. The film does a much better job of creating story and character arcs for James and Henry than the first two films did (I can barely remember those), and even finds space to make Jesse Eisenberg kind of endearing in his slightly clangy turn as a The Day the Earth Stood Still riff, potential robot boss Dort. It’s another random element in a series of random elements, which sums up the philosophy for the whole jabbering series. The difference this time is that Coffin & Co. seem to be having a more gleeful, anarchic time – and Coffin seems to have finally found some level of respect for both the audience and his fellow filmmakers.