Minions

Five years after Despicable Me (2010), the small yellow henchmen who stole that film’s best scenes get a film of their own. Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin direct, and Coffin supplies the voice of every Minion on screen, which may be the hardest-working credit in animation. The question the film has to answer is whether a creature designed for twelve-second gags can carry 91 minutes. The answer is that it can carry about twenty, and those twenty are a delight.

Geoffrey Rush narrates the prologue in the hushed voice of a wildlife documentary as the Minions crawl out of the sea and attach themselves to the largest thing in sight. They follow a Tyrannosaurus into a volcano, build a pharaoh’s pyramid upside down, open the curtains for Dracula and point Napoleon’s cannon the wrong way. Claire Dodgson cuts each disaster down to the exact second it needs and moves on before the laugh has finished. We laughed, loudly and more than once, and the pyramid did it. The gabble Coffin gives them, scraps of Spanish, Italian and English run together, is funnier than any proper line in the film, because you hear the meaning without the words.

Then it is 1968, and Brian Lynch’s script sends Kevin, Stuart and Bob out of the ice cave to find a new boss. Michael Keaton and Allison Janney, as the Nelsons, a family of bank robbers as wholesome as a cereal advert, are the best of the humans and get two scenes before they are gone. Sandra Bullock’s Scarlet Overkill is where the film puts its money. Eric Guillon dresses her in a red gown with a rocket hidden in the skirt, and she is good to look at, but Bullock has been given one note, wanting the crown, and spends the film shouting it. Jon Hamm, as her husband Herb, gets more laughs by doing less, a relaxed man quietly pleased with his own gadgets.

The London stretch is handsome. Guillon builds a 1968 of red buses, bowler hats and a Tower of London the colour of a biscuit, and there is a chase in which the police pour tea at the wheel that is the one set piece after the prologue to match it. Jennifer Saunders plays the Queen as a woman who would rather be in a pub, and Steve Coogan turns up in two roles, a professor and a tower guard, and is barely recognisable in either. But the heist is also where the film sags. The Minions were built to stand at the edge of someone else’s scene; placed at the centre with a plot to carry, they have nothing to want except a master, and sixty minutes cannot be built on that.

Somewhere around the hour mark we were bored, and then faintly cross at being bored by something so bright and so loud. Heitor Pereira’s score hurries along under everything, but the music the film relies on is a run of Sixties hits dropped in so often that it starts to feel like a radio left on in the next room. Each one arrives to tell us a scene is fun, and by the fifth or sixth we had stopped believing it.

Despicable Me worked because Gru had a want and the Minions decorated it. Here the decoration is asked to hold up the house, and Lynch’s answer is to keep adding rooms: a new villain, a new chase, a new costume. Steve Carell appears briefly and late, and we will say no more about that.

It carries a U certificate and runs 91 minutes, and children will laugh from start to finish and ask for it again before the credits have ended. Adults get the prologue, the tea chase and Hamm, which is roughly a third of the film. Sit down for the first twenty minutes and feel free to make the tea during the rest.