Hide your bananas and break out your fart guns because those despicable Minions have returned to cinema screens once again.
The third instalment in the Minions series, spinning off from Illumination’s supervillain comedy Despicable Me, pulls away from all things Gru, introducing us to a whole new tribe of our favourite bright yellow anarchists.
Like any group of Minions, these (seemingly immortal) guys travel the world in search of a ‘Big Boss’ to offer their services to. Their centuries-long quest sees them working alongside a towering cyclops, a mysterious warlock and a soon-for-the-chop vaguely French aristocrat before a runaway train brings them out of the dusty American West and into the vaguely familiar Hollywoodland, where dreams of movie stardom really do seem to come true…
‘We are no longer evil! We work in the motion picture industry!’
Yes, after half a dozen films of truly villainous outings, Minions and Monsters has swapped out the status quo in favour of an interestingly off-the-wall concept. It’s a game of two halves, combining (oddly enough) two of my favourite things: early cinema and Lovecraftian horror. Stick with me on this one.
The Minions crash land in 1920s Hollywood(land) and soon find themselves working for Christoph Waltz’s Max, a journeyman director at the beck and call of the Bright Brothers, enormous twins played by Jeff Bridges.
Their studio – Bright Brothers Pictures – is surely beyond any real-world comparison; the eye-catching water tower on the lot can only be a coincidental inclusion. In any case, they all really Warner make some money, and when fifty-odd little creatures fall into their laps, they turn the Minions into movie stars pretty much overnight.
From their debut feature, Barbarians with Chainsaws, to stand-out hits like Look Behind You…And Then Down and the snappily-titled They Came From the Stars To Hit You With a Frying Pan: Part 4 – The Awakening, our Minions seem to be going from strength to strength. When the advent of sound reveals their cripplingly inability to deliver lines in English, however, they are swiftly chucked right out of the industry with Faragian aplomb.
With their futures on the rocks, wannabe director James, his right-hand man Henry and their lovable cameraman Ed break off to resurrect their careers with the ultimate new creature feature: Minions y Monstras! They just might need to summon a few demons from the dawn of time first.
Never in a million years did I think walking out of Minions 2 that the next film in the set would have the little guys calling on a Cthulhu-esque eldritch horror from a dusty old Necronomicon. It’s an absolutely mad idea, but a refreshing one in a world of by-the-numbers sequels and continuations. The story here is far from perfect – by my usual critical standards, the back-half is a little rushed and the main elements we’ve seen in all the trailers only really come to fruition in the last twenty minutes – but the proposition of it all is just bold enough to work in spite of that.
With the Monsters side of the coin only really coming into play in the second half, the first act lives and dies entirely on a menagerie of cineliterate in-jokes and callbacks to the golden era of Hollywood. On paper, that could turn out to be really awful (Space Jam 2 served as a weird experiment in throwing everything and the kitchen sink out of the Warner Bros. back catalogue and onto the screen) but the brilliantly simple comedy that the Minions have made their own has everything singing in the right key.
From a bait-and-switch Universal logo that sees us rewind from the modern reel back a hundred years to an era-appropriate one (with a grin-inducing black and white rendition of the Illumination logo, too), the film serves up its jokes with a more-than-healthy dose of lighthearted charm that makes each homage feel more loving than cynical.
I could now go on to spoil every reference and nod I found in the film’s ninety-minute runtime, but I won’t. One, because the fun really stems from discovering those little goodies yourself and two, because I surely missed a whole load of them that covered gaps in my Old Hollywood repertoire! Rest assured, there’s a wide variety on offer, from riffs on the medium’s first steps (which had me running to the side of the screening room for fear of the Minions coming out of the screen to wallop me in the face with oversized hammers); a round-up of the usual suspects to quell classic film fans and even a good handful of more modern gags, too.
They aren’t always masterfully done but plenty had me laughing out loud all the same.
The kaiju, once summoned, do get the rougher end of the stick, partly because the melding of Hollywood homage and Lovecraftian entities is rather ambitious, but in a way, the simplicity of the plot serves to compliment the skit-like comedy at play here without the whole thing feeling utterly paper-thin. In an ideal world, these elements would’ve been fleshed out a little more (the film is remarkably brief but as it’s so enjoyable, whacking ten more minutes in the runtime might not have hurt) but such is the power of the Minions that they do just kind of have you switching your critical brain off. At a certain point, I was just laughing and smiling along with the mayhem.
Equally, there’s a rather long-winded subplot regarding a robot enthusiast called Dolt, whose eccentricities rival that of the Minions themselves. At points, I wondered where that whole arc was going (especially when it served as a B-plot drawing time away from the creatures) but by the end, I was glad of his inclusion even if he could quite easily have been taken out in favour of some other funny critique of 1950s sci-fi.
In a way, we really shouldn’t be so surprised to see a Minions movie grapple with this period of cinema, given that they carry so much of that entire era’s DNA within the yellow blood cells of their banana-based slapstick comedy. As it stands, Minions and Monsters is a fun little ride back through time to a bygone age with plenty of gags for classic cinema fans and the younger crowds alike.
I don’t think homages to 1930s flicks, for example, are likely to alienate the child audience here because writer/director Pierre Coffin and co-writer Brian Lynch have sprinkled enough cut-and-dry physical humour into each loving rendition to carry the laughter throughout.
Yes, it’s messy round the edges and with a different mindset, you could tear it down to size but the film seems so determined to leave you with a spring in your step that you’d have to be pretty stone-hearted to pick it apart.
BBFC: Rated U for very mild comic violence, threat, rude humour.
Minions and Monsters is in cinemas now.
