In a sentenceSmall yellow men rediscover the silent film, then remember they are Minions and start shouting
The Minions, voiced as ever by their director Pierre Coffin, arrive in Hollywood in the 1920s, when films are silent and the studios are still working out what a film is for. The small yellow horde finds its way into the picture business and, briefly, to the top of it. Hollywood, as the tagline has it, has a monster problem. Trey Parker voices Goomi, Allison Janney is Olivia and Jesse Eisenberg is Dort; Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan and Phil LaMarr fill out the lot, and George Lucas turns up as himself. Coffin directs from a script he wrote with Brian Lynch. It runs 90 minutes and carries a U certificate.
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Pierre Coffin’s third standalone Minions film sends its yellow chorus to 1920s Hollywood and, for about an hour, has more ideas about cinema than we expected. Then it becomes the film it always was. Still the best of them.
The Minions have been to the Sixties, to the Seventies and to the villain convention circuit, and each time the joke was the same: they are small, they are many, they speak a language made of soup and Spanish, and they break things. Minions & Monsters has the sense to put them somewhere the breaking means something. Pierre Coffin, who has directed these creatures and done their voices since Despicable Me (2010), sets them down in Hollywood in the 1920s, when the pictures did not talk either. That is the one good idea the series has ever had about itself, and for an hour Coffin and his co-writer Brian Lynch follow it properly.
The first half is the film to see. A horde that communicates by gesture and noise turns out to be perfectly built for silent comedy, and Coffin knows it. The gags come from the mechanics of early filmmaking, from cameras and sets and the people who get paid to stand in front of them, and they are pitched so that a child laughs at the fall while an adult recognises what is being fallen from. The town itself is drawn with more care than anything in the previous films: the backlots, the offices, the feeling of an industry inventing itself in a hurry. We laughed, properly and often, and then felt slightly caught out, because we had come in braced for ninety minutes of banana jokes.
The voices are cast well and used unevenly. Christoph Waltz purrs as if every sentence has a contract attached. Allison Janney’s Olivia is the sharpest thing in the film whenever she is on screen. Trey Parker, as Goomi, gets the tone the film is after, gleeful and a little unkind, and Jeff Bridges plays two parts, Frank and Elwood, with the same easy rumble for both. Jesse Eisenberg does his nervous patter as Dort. George Lucas voices George Lucas, which is the kind of gag that sounds better in a meeting than on a screen, and it is over quickly.
The second half takes a turn we will not describe, except to say that it is louder. The creature designs are good, big and strange and pleasingly unlike the Minions themselves, but from the midpoint on the film has one mode, which is chaos, and it stays in it. Gregory Perler’s cutting, which in the first half had the timing of a good silent two-reeler, speeds up until it is simply fast. John Powell’s score does the same, swelling under every chase to tell us how exciting this is, when the first half had trusted us to notice on our own. We were not bored, exactly. We were tired, in the way a parent is tired at the end of a birthday party, and we were a little cross that a film which had found something better had let it go.
The Minions themselves remain what they have always been, and the film’s cleverest move is to make that the story. Their rise and fall in the picture business is played as a joke about talent, or the lack of it, and about how easily a town falls in love with a novelty. It is not deep. It does not need to be. But when the second half arrives, the film stops making that joke and starts making the older, louder one, and we missed the difference.
Against the series’ own standard this is a clear step up. Minions (2015) and Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022) were sketch reels with a plot attached; this has a place, a period and, for a while, a subject. Most critics have said much the same, and we agree with them. The lone dissenting voice finds the Hollywood setting a promise the film breaks, and we would not argue with the diagnosis, only with the severity: an hour of good is an hour of good, whatever follows it.
Take the children. Stay for the first half with your full attention and let the second wash over you, which is roughly what it wants. It runs 90 minutes and carries a U certificate.
The reviews are largely warm, and several critics call this the best of the standalone Minions films. The praise clusters in one place: the 1920s Hollywood setting and its steady run of nods to silent cinema, which most reviewers say gives the usual slapstick a shape it has lacked. The voice cast and the monster designs draw approving mentions, as does the world building of the period setting.
The reservations cluster too. Variety and The Hollywood Reporter both feel the film is at its sharpest in the first half and loses momentum once the monsters arrive and the pace turns frantic, and The AV Club finds the slapstick disjointed in places. The spread is otherwise narrow, with one clear dissenter: The Guardian argues the promising setup gives way to repetitive franchise chaos and that the attempt to give the Minions pathos is undone by cluttered plotting. Nobody else is that severe.
The review calls it a delightful homage to classic Hollywood silent films. It praises the clever nods to early cinema and the anarchic storytelling that entertains both kids and cinephiles.
Read the full review →The critic calls it a charming, frequently funny adventure that is the best standalone Minions outing yet, praising the thick and fast movie references, fabulous voice cast and visual gags aplenty.
Read the full review →The critic finds it easier to embrace the Minions' gleeful hyperactivity than to dismiss the franchise. They single out the film's surprisingly uncynical and imaginative approach as the best in the series.
Read the full review →The critic finds it far more fun and inventive than prior entries in the franchise, a helter-skelter third spinoff with a barrage of giggles and an unexpected movie history lesson set in 1920s Hollywood.
Read the full review →The critic sees it as a creative high for the series, especially in its first half with cinephile gags and slapstick. They note it loses some momentum later but remains a fun, willful entertainment.
Read the full review →The critic sees the film as more of the same juvenile Minions antics but with an improbable love letter to movies woven in. They single out the affectionate references to classic Hollywood films and storytelling for praise amid the usual slapstick.
Read the full review →
Singin' in the RainThe best film about Hollywood learning to talk, and the funniest.
The ArtistA silent film about the end of silent films, with a very good dog.
HugoScorsese’s children’s film about the birth of cinema, patient where this one is frantic.
FrankenweenieTim Burton’s black-and-white monster comedy for children, gentler than it looks.
Despicable MeWhere the Minions began, before anyone thought they could carry a film.
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