What’s it about?
Set in 1920s Hollywood, the Minions attempt to find actual monsters to cast in a monster movie.
What’d we think?
After 2010’s Despicable Me introduced the world to the little yellow wierdos, most of my exposure to the Minions has come from secondhand memes courtesy of Facebook mums and piles of faded merchandise taking up space in op shops. To say I was hesitant about Minions & Monsters is an understatement, which wasn’t helped when I learned this is actually the seventh entry in what’s now considered a franchise. The depth of my professionalism is second only to the emptiness of my social calendar, so I grabbed my popcorn and elbowed my way through crowds of excited kids to the back of the cinema, girding myself for what I assumed would be a rough 90 minutes. It takes a big man to admit when he’s wrong, and I’m currently big enough to be one of the movie’s titular monsters. Minions & Monsters is a delightfully unpretentious love letter to the golden age of Hollywood, packed with simple but solid humour and nice messaging that never gets too heavy-handed.
The tone is set early on with the opening titles flashing back through all the prior iterations of the Universal Pictures logo until we land in a sweet little montage of the earliest days of moving pictures. The movie earned the first of many sensible chuckles from me here, inserting the Minions into Eadweard Muybridge’s The Horse in Motion, the Lumière brothers’ The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, and Georges Méliès’ A Trip to the Moon. The kids in the audience were loving it, and this is the core of why the movie works – the Minions clearly owe a debt to Chaplin, Keaton, and Lloyd (all of whom have delightful little cameos), and this movie lovingly repays that debt. The language of cinema is universal, and there’s no better lingua franca than slapstick.
After a cursory setup showing the Minions finding and accidentally killing some prior bosses (there is a surprisingly graphic decapitation gag that had both the kids and me absolutely howling), they find themselves in the studio system of Hollywood’s golden age as unexpected stars. The actual plot of the movie follows James and Henry, two Minions who split off from the tribe to pursue the dream of making their own monster movie, aided by an adorable little Lovecraftian horror named Goomi (voiced by Trey Parker). The rest of the minions continue their search for a villain to serve, eventually finding Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a The Day The Earth Stood Still-style robot sent to destroy the planet. The middle of the movie loses a little bit of momentum as we have story beats to follow instead of just silly setpieces, but it’s all reincorporated quickly enough by the end that it’s not too noticeable.
As a sceptical newcomer to the franchise, Minions & Monsters was an incredibly pleasant surprise. The laughs come thick and fast for the little people, there are plenty of loving references to the period for the grown-up cinephiles in the audience, and the whole thing moves at such an energetic pace that it doesn’t overstay its welcome.
