Minions & Monsters review – a smart premise descends into more of the same

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The yellow, cylindrical, overall-clad creatures known as the Minions first appeared as loyal henchmen to Steve Carell’s villainous Gru in Illumination’s Despicable Me, which chronicled Gru’s attempt to steal the moon with the help of three orphaned girls. Along the way, Gru learned affection, the girls grew up, and the Minions – well, the Minions always stay the same. They are cute, defenseless and incompetent. They speak in “Minionese”, a gibberish mishmash of languages endlessly memed by a generation with a nearly dadaist devotion to babble. Despicable Me sequels have, in the past 16 years, coalesced into the highest-grossing animated franchise of all time, in part because of the Minions’ viral success.

With Minions & Monsters, the seventh entry in the franchise and third movie in the Minion-centered spin-off series, returning director Pierre Coffin retreads much of the territory covered by 2015’s Minions. Like that movie, Minions & Monsters starts with a peripatetic tribe of Minions in search of their next despicable boss. But instead of winding up exiled in an ice cave, this time the Minions find themselves riding a train off the rails and into the Bright Brothers’ studio lot in late 1920s Los Angeles, at the height of Hollywood’s silent era.

Minions & Monsters is Coffin’s “love letter to cinema”, a paean to the medium that boasts its classic Hollywood references – as the Minions crash into the lot like the train at La Ciotat, we see Illuminationized versions of Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and Dooley Wilson’s Sam. The narrative framework is provided by Olivia (Allison Janney), a present-time studio lot guide who lectures a group of visitors on the Minions’ influential place in Hollywood history.

With this initial set-up, Coffin reaches the movie’s spare highs. The silly pleasures of seeing a Minion stand in for Méliès’s moon aside, the film’s most ingenious move is to make the Minions silent era stars, directed by the German-inflected Max (Christoph Waltz) and beholden to the whims of the imposing Bright Brothers (both voiced by Jeff Bridges), modeled on the Warners. In this part of the film, slapstick gags abound in joyful homage to the physical comedy perfected by Chaplin and Keaton. Once sound technology is introduced, the Minions are fired from the studio, because despite their best efforts, they cannot speak English.

Had the film been contained by its clever premise - the Minions must fight to preserve their place in Hollywood – it might have achieved the crystalline simplicity that is a hallmark of good children’s films. But aiming to both lead the Minions in a newer, smarter direction and appease the gibberish-fest expectations set by the franchise, Coffin bites off more than he can chew. As a result, Minions & Monsters disappointingly circles back to where it started.

If 2015’s Minions endeavored to distinguish the personalities of Kevin, Bob and Stuart (voiced by Coffin, as all Minions are), Minions & Monsters marks Illumination’s first attempt to invest the Minions with pathos. Protagonist James’s ambition to make a monster film drives the plot and creates tension with his best friend, Henry, whose admiration for James’s artistic spirit turns into dismay as James loses perspective. Henry and James are social pariahs in a tribe unified by the overarching Minion purpose, which is to serve a villain. They are ostracized because they operate on something Minions are not, definitionally, supposed to have: ego.

An auspicious notion, and it might have corrected the Minions franchise’s core issue, which is its lack of emotional resonance. But soon, the Minions fall back into their old ways, and the second and third acts – cluttered with extraneous characters and absurd situations involving an ancient spell book from a fallen master; a robot; and, if you can believe it, the women’s rights movement – fail to cohere.

The film’s punchline is that, attempting to make a monster movie, the Minions find themselves in one. A similarly ironic wink characterizes the opening, which proposes that the Minions deserve a place in the annals of Hollywood history with other box-office record-setters, like George Lucas (playing himself) and ET. But there is something sad about the redundancy with which the movie proceeds from these ironies, reaching no insight, teaching its young audience nothing. By the end of the film, any grasp on essence is lost: the Minions wind up saving the day as heroes. Aren’t they supposed to serve a villain?

A core confusion about what the Minions actually are – Cinco Paul, a co-writer on Despicable Me, has publicly disavowed the franchise’s idea of the Minions as an immortal nomadic tribe – indicates the lack of conviction that ails the Minions movies. To Illumination’s fattening pockets, it hardly makes a difference; Coffin himself has spoken about the toll commercial demand has taken on his own investment in the Minions. Once used by Gru to achieve far-flung dreams, the Minions are now mostly used by Illumination to make money. At least in that sense, they continue to fulfill their purpose.