Minions & Monsters movie review: A strange mixture of silliness and cinematic delight, until it isn’t

The Minions have never gotten much critical respect despite their major role in the film Despicable me series, which became the highest-grossing animated film series of all time. So, it’s clear that in their latest adventure (the seventh entry overall), the incomprehensible little yellow creatures are taking over Hollywood, and becoming a big-screen sensation. Fact will likely follow fiction when it comes to Minions and monstersIt is the smartest and funniest movie they have appeared in. At least, until it isn’t.

Co-writer Pierre Coffin (directing solo for the first time and writing the screenplay with… Client Veteran Brian Lynch) makes this effort a love letter to Hollywood. Not today’s Hollywood, mind you, but the early days. The film oozes affection even before it starts, with its use of every Universal Pictures logo from the present day to the studio’s inception. The opening montage shows the Minion introducing Zelig’s style to classic shots by the likes of Muybridge and the Lumiere Brothers.

The story’s framing device is a Hollywood museum tour by an enthusiastic guide (Allison Janney), who is horrified to discover that the young tourists have no idea what an important role the Minion has played in cinematic history. The sequence provides the opportunity for funny appearances from no less than George Lucas.

Flashback, where we see the Minions desperately searching for a new evil boss and running into obstacles at every turn almost like killing a giant Titan. Eventually, they make their way into Hollywood in its early days when they find themselves inadvertently interrupting a film directed by Max (Christoph Waltz), who looks like every European immigrant who has found a new career there.

Max assumes he’s going to be fired when he shows the footage to studio heads Frank and Elwood (both voiced by Jeff Bridges, who are amused). But movie moguls know a star when they see one, and the Minions soon become the toast of Hollywood. That is, until, like many silent screen stars, their careers end abruptly with the advent of talkies.

The first half of the film, which focuses on their cinematic adventures, contains gags that movie buffs will love even if they’ll be completely off-putting to younger viewers, including homages to classic screen routines by Chaplin, Lloyd, and Keaton. But the film references don’t end there, with nods to Casablanca, Citizen KaneScience fiction films of the 1950s and many others. When the Minions first enter the soundstage, they encounter cinematic epics being filmed around every corner, and you can feel the joy of filmmaking.

When the Minions James and Henry (Coffin, who does all the Minion voices, makes one hope he has a good ENT doctor) lose their acting careers, they embark on the same path that many artists have taken. They try to become directors, hoping to make a monster movie featuring real monsters. The first person he summons from the book of evil spells turns out to be the disappointingly diminutive and non-threatening Gowmi (Trey Parker). But Goomi helps them find the real deal in the form of creepy Phillips (Bobby Moynihan) and Howard (Phil LaMarr). When the monsters reveal a sinister agenda that goes beyond just becoming movie stars, the Minions are forced to fight them to save the world.

Another subplot involves an alien robot (Jesse Eisenberg) whose similar plans for world domination are interrupted when he falls in love with a suffragette (Zoey Deutch).

The whole thing, as you may have discovered by now, is a bit stuffed. Minions and monsters It proves most effective in its first half before the monsters, which eventually include a large orange blob covered in countless eyes, enter the scene and the film descends into the usual frenzy that befalls many animated films aimed at children.

But for a long time at least, it’s sophisticated and surprisingly effective in its satirical humour, with so many visual gags and Easter eggs that you’ll need multiple viewings to catch them all, something that clearly won’t be a problem for Universal.

In conclusion, when James wins the Golden Globe Award, it’s hard not to think that the filmmakers have the same goal in mind. And this time, they might have a chance to make it happen.