Minions and Monsters: Movie Review

Cast: Alison Janney, Zoey Deutch, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, George Lucas, Trey Parker
Director: Pierre Coffin

There's a moment in the latest spinoff for the Minions when the yellow pests are kicked out of 1920s  Hollywood, blamed for ruining the box office and arrival of talking pictures with their gibberish and inability to act.

It's an almost meta and prescient moment that could see audiences feeling the same, given how scattershot and average this homage to old school Hollywood and latest outing for the loveable Despicable Me sidekicks is.

The seventh outing for the yellow perils, beloved by children because of their nonsense language and slapstick behaviour, concerns itself with the story of Minions Henry and James, a pair of outcasts whose desire to tell stories sees them bond.

Loosely, the film celebrates the life of the Minions and how intertwined their world became with Hollywood as tribes of them headed off to find a Big Boss to serve, as all Minions should. But when Henry and James inadvertently lead their masters to their near-death, the Minions clans are outlawed and end up in 1920s Los Angeles, crashing a film shoot being overseen by director Max (Christoph Waltz).

When their antics charm the owners of the Bright Brothers Pictures studio and the masses brought up on silent movies, they become the Hollywood elite association. But their star falls quickly with the advent of talking pictures and soon James has a desire to create a Kaiju-led picture to get them back in the studio good books.

With homages to Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, The Blob and The Day The Earth Stood Still, Coffin's love letter to the Hollywood of the past is clearly a passion project - and one that's well-executed in parts. And while the animation of the Minions is still superlative, the nonsense this time around fails to find a creative boost to justify keep mining their raison d'etre.

It's to be noted most of the younger audience will be less interested in the nods to Hollywood past and will be more concerned with the slapstick - of which there is plenty - but Minions & Monsters seems almost disconnected from the simplicity that the creatures have become known for through the years.

It's self-aware and meta in extremis, but at no real stage is it incredibly smart or clever in its storytelling as the dungaree-wearing menaces barrel from one moment to the next. Sure, you could argue there's an allegory of the Minions serving the evil masters of Hollywood and Irene, the amorphous blob filled with eyes that imperils Los Angeles at the end could be seen as a metaphor for the ever-hungry eyes of audiences, but it's a bit of a surface-level reach from Coffin and his writers.

There's not enough emotional heft here and while the film maxes out at around 90 minutes, it still feels its weight midway.

By the end of Minions & Monsters, you're exhausted - and based on what's on screen, so are the writers when it comes to ideas for what to do next with these pesky critters.