Minions & Monsters

The Despicable Me franchise has been going on for so long that everybody should know what to expect from these movies: you either love them or hate them. Or, well, maybe you simply tolerate them: they have their charm, some funny gags, and the voice work is great, but sitting through ninety minutes of gibberish and slapstick humour with dumb stories and dumber characters can be a test of patience.

Minions & Monsters, however, has a few special elements that set it apart from the rest of the movies (those are, four Despicable Me movies and two prior Minions movies). The seventh overall film in the franchise is actually a very clever homage to classical Hollywood, stressing the fact that the Minions' physical comedy is truly a continuation from the comedies by Chaplin and Buster Keaton, whose influence will be felt forever.

Of course, the movie is still aimed at kids, but it's filled with cinephile references as it's set in Hollywood in the 1920s, with the invention of sound cinema being a major part of the story. The first half of the movie is a delight and takes full use of its setting, beginning with a very long prologue with almost nothing but Minionese language that almost feels like a silent movie, the story being told in action and expressions. Sadly, the second half returns to a much more conventional route that forgets its premise and could have been set anywhere.

Minions & Monsters feels very much like the Minions themselves: chaotic, unpredictable, oblivious to any rules or logic. At one moment they may surprise you with with a stroke of brilliance, only to disappoint you minutes later by returning to their idiotic ways. It's almost two movies in one, and sadly the first movie is by far the better one. From the opening credits, with real clips from the very first motion pictures and films made by Muybridge or the Lumierè brothers mixed with the Minions, you start thinking you are witnessing something special.

Yes, it's another series of references with little substance between them, but they are not pop-culture-from-the-80s, still-commercialisable-references that usually tend to appear in these movies. Instead, it's a long, affectionate, and frequently hilarious love letter to Classical American cinema, which is rare to find in a children's movie. Anybody watching the first half of the film, portraying this pre-Depression Hollywood with such immense devotion and romanticism, will likely develop some interest or curiosity from that era, and if a kid becomes a cinephile from watching a Minions movie, then this movie will have been more than worth it.

Unfortunately, right at the point when it could become especially interesting, and actually poignant beyond being a quick fire of references, the story takes some really weird turns, some characters are abandoned and new characters are introduced that feel completely out of place (and some anachronic, like its depiction of pulp science-fiction a couple decades beforehand) and it turns into a much more conventional movie.

There are Minions, and there are monsters, so it's not like it doesn't deliver on its promise, and it still retains some of the weirdness of the first half, but completely at the service of a much more predictable story that takes itself a bit too seriously, as well as deviating too much from the Hollywood and early cinema context that was making the movie so much more interesting. It's fine on its own, but it's the usual stuff you would expect from the Minions, which is a let down after a much more enjoyable first half... but the core audience of the film will probably enjoy that second half more, which is action packed and filled with cute little monsters significantly more.

In the end, it's a bittersweet sensation of a missed opportunity: Illumination came very close to actually making a compelling Minions movie, one that pays tribute to the origins of Hollywood and particularly to the silent comedy films from Chaplin and Keaton of which the Minions owe everything. But the old habits of Illumination, which also afflict the Super Mario movies, remain: the inability to fully commit to one idea, to give some space for the characters to grow and shine, the tendency to bomb the viewer with every idea they had with no filter just to see what sticks, without thinking first if it actually works or makes sense or if it will make the film better rather than bloated. At least with Minions & Monsters we can confidently say... it isn't "half bad".