Minions & Monsters: Mark Kermode’s movie review (video).
Just above this article, you will find Mark Kermode giving his thoughts on Minions & Monsters, and quite possibly doing so with the air of a man who has seen cinema both rise to the heavens and be hit repeatedly in the face by a custard pie. The video is Mark’s verdict, and what follows is SFcrowsnest magazine’s take.
Minions & Monsters is the latest animated comedy from Illumination, directed by Pierre Coffin and written by Coffin and Brian Lynch, and it takes the small banana-coloured agents of organised nonsense back to 1920s Hollywood. This, frankly, is a more natural habitat for them than one might expect. Silent cinema was built on pratfalls, frantic chases, elaborate physical business and people being hit by objects that had no regard for dignity. In other words, the Minions have not so much travelled back in time as found the ancestral swamp from which their comic DNA first slithered.
The plot sends a separate tribe of Minions into Old Hollywood, where their usual search for a splendidly dreadful master gets tangled up with the business of movie-making. One moment they are blundering into a production lot, the next they are silent-film sensations, which is logical enough. If your dialogue is already an international soup of squeaks, burbles and banana-adjacent panic, the silent era is probably your Oscars window.
Then, naturally, sound arrives. The talkies, so useful to actors with cheekbones and diction, prove less helpful to creatures whose spoken language sounds like someone trying to explain astrophysics while trapped inside a tumble dryer full of marbles. The Minions find themselves out of step with the new Hollywood, and from there the film lurches towards monster-making, magic books, strange creatures and a full cinematic banquet of controlled idiocy served on a plate with scorch marks.
There is something rather cunning about the premise. The Minions have always owed a debt to silent comedy, even when buried under layers of franchise machinery and plush-toy economics. Put them in a world of hand-cranked cameras, studio bosses, melodramatic directors and rubber-limbed physical comedy, and suddenly their whole existence starts to make more sense. They are not merely sidekicks for Gru. They are vaudeville gremlins with dungarees and unionised chaos.
The voice cast is also one of those Illumination line-ups that looks as if someone fired a glitter cannon into an awards ceremony. Pierre Coffin returns as the Minions, joined by Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr and Trey Parker. Christoph Waltz as a film director in a Minions movie feels like the sort of casting that escaped from a dream after eating too much cheese. Jeff Bridges turning up as studio-boss energy is equally pleasing, because if Hollywood history teaches us anything, it is that every studio needs a man who sounds as if he could approve a monster picture, cancel lunch and explain the universe in the same sentence.
The film’s monster-movie angle also gives it a chance to rummage through the cobwebbed prop cupboard of classic cinema. Frankensteinian flourishes, giant-creature nonsense and studio-lot panic are all fertile ground for a franchise that works best when it stops trying to justify itself and simply starts detonating the furniture. The Minions remain what they have always been: walking comedy punctuation marks, tiny yellow exclamation points in goggles, inserted wherever the plot requires a crash, a scream, a fart noise or a sudden collapse in public order.
The danger, of course, is that every Minions film exists on a knife-edge between delightful slapstick and being locked in a soft-play centre during a recorder recital. Used sparingly, they are comic seasoning. Used without restraint, they become a migraine with merchandising rights. That is where Kermode’s review above comes in, because Mark is rather better placed to decide whether Minions & Monsters balances its affection for cinema history with the franchise’s bottomless appetite for mayhem, or whether it merely throws a top hat on the chaos and calls it Buster Keaton.
Still, there is a pleasingly daft grandeur to the idea of the Minions making their own monster movie. It turns them from hench-creatures into accidental auteurs, which is an alarming thought for anyone who has ever sat through a committee meeting. Give a Minion a camera and you may not get Citizen Kane, but you will probably get a dolly shot, three fires, a squid, and one assistant director reconsidering their life choices.
For younger viewers, Minions & Monsters looks like another fizzy burst of banana-powered silliness. For older film fans, the Old Hollywood setting may offer enough nods, winks and collapsing scenery to make the experience feel less like babysitting and more like being mugged by a film studies lecture wearing goggles. Whether that makes it inspired, exhausting, or both, is the question dangling from the studio rafters. Either way, the Minions have now invaded Hollywood history. Chaplin had the cane, Keaton had the stone face, and Illumination has a small yellow workforce capable of destroying civilisation while trying to operate a camera. Cinema has survived sound, colour, 3D, streaming and popcorn priced like contraband uranium. It can probably survive this too.
