Minions & Monsters Review - A Curmudgeon’s Take on a Mixed Bag of Gibberish

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“Bello!Tulaliloo ti am. Me want banana. Poopaye!” - a minion

In 2010, for better or worse, the little yellow bastards known as minions made their debut in Despicable Me. Much like Mater was a secondary character in Cars, the minions were rightfully not the center of attention. Then Cars 2 happened and everyone realized Mater was best in small doses. The same can be said for these little yellow creatures that speak gibberish and operate with the mentality of the Three Stooges. They can be funny but for ninety minutes it’s a real test of one’s mental fortitude. 

To be completely fair, I didn’t enter into this with a sense of hospitality as if to say, “I’m not so sure about this but I’ll give it a chance.” It was disdain on my part from the moment I got the invite to see Minions & Monsters. But these days screenings are so scarce that not going to one when an actual invite comes along feels borderline detrimental to any and all possible future screenings. So as much as I didn’t want to see this one, I had to. Now I admit I’m being unfairly negative and closed-minded but I’m acknowledging that while I didn’t want to see it, it does surprisingly have its merits. Unfortunately after a strong first act, it does deteriorate into what I thought it would from the moment I heard this movie was being made. So it’s a mixed bag I guess. I’ll get to that soon enough.

The first thirty to forty minutes are genuinely entertaining. It’s clever and funny, even exploring some double entendres and unexpectedly brazen adult humor. It celebrates the allure of old Hollywood touching on movies like 1927’s Metropolis, 1954’s Creature from the Black Lagoon, and 1932’s The Mummy. It momentarily salivates at the thought of Keanu Reeves in cyberpunk attire and lovingly acknowledges the influence of George Lucas as he’s quite literally stuck behind glass for gawking crowds to stare at, wide-eyed and clueless. It shows the beauty of the silent era and the chaos of introducing sound to the medium. For many young children, this could very well be their first taste of such a crazy but highly innovative time in cinema and that is an exciting possibility. 

But then a sharp shift takes place, and I didn’t fully realize it until I noticed just how bored and sleepy I was getting. I found myself completely disinterested when the main premise began to take hold. After the minions are essentially kicked out of Hollywood as the talkies gain traction, they find themselves searching for their next life venture. It comes in the form of a dream drawn out by the eccentric James. He loves to tell stories, so making a movie just makes sense. To make his dream movie—one full of scary monsters—he decides he must seek out real ones. With the help of a new green friend named Goomi, the minions trek into the unknown to find their monstrous stars for the role of a lifetime.

It’s at this point that it drops the fascination with the golden era of Hollywood for a far less interesting and generic adventure with faceless, metaphorically colorless monsters who predictably get out of control forcing the minions to save Hollywood and the rest of the world.

It’s actually impressive how much it drops off after the first act. There’s some minor fun with certain characters like Dort, voiced by Jesse Eisenberg, a cosplaying dork pretending to be an alien robot who falls in love with a 1920s suffragette. Christoph Waltz plays Max, a brilliant amalgamation of Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, and F.W. Murnau—three visionary European émigrés whose masterworks defined the silent and early sound eras of cinema. For reasons unknown, it squanders all of this for a one-dimensional color cluster of boring monster tropes inserted for the titular minions to defeat.

I want to make something perfectly clear – this is all the opinion of a 37-year-old going on 67-year-old curmudgeon who isn’t the biggest fan of animated features. This movie wasn’t made for me. While the film's second half lost me, the theater's resident gaggle of kids completely lost their minds with joy, proving the movie knows exactly who its audience is. It shows signs of brilliance in the opening act before unfortunately losing steam the rest of the way, but the kids in your life will likely have a fantastic time. For a movie studio that loves to beat its franchises into the ground—looking at you, Fast & Furious—Universal proves that, at least with the Minions, there is still something left to say in gibberish. All despite my gray-haired yammerings. 

Rated PG For: Action/violence, language, and rude/macabre humor

Runtime: 90 minutes

After Credits Scene: Multiple mid-credit tidbits

Genre: Animated, Comedy, Adventure

Starring: Pierre Coffin, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Trey Parker

Directed By: Pierre Coffin

Out of 10

Story: 6/ Acting(voice): 7/ Directing: 6/ Visuals: 7

OVERALL: 6/10

Buy to Own: No.

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Check out the trailer below: