Despicable meh
The Minions sub-franchise of Illumination’s flagship Despicable Me series is basically the Oops! All Berries of cinema. It takes something already over-blasted with sugar and lacking in nutritional substance and asks: what if we cranked the hyperactive slapstick sidekick shenanigans up to eleven? What if we made the high-jinks the main course instead of the little surge of flavor on the side? The answer, it turns out, is that you don’t really have a feature-length narrative on your hands. The first Minions suffered greatly from this. After the charming sketches that make up its first half fizzle out, the second half’s attempt to stick the landing on an actual story falls flat in the absence of that strange concept called “characters.” Minions 2 course-corrected by asking a better question: What if Minions was actually just a Despicable Me prequel? The result was barely passable, which is to say: easily the best Despicable Me movie I’ve seen, still parceled into chunks that resemble sketches, but held together by Gru and coated in a pleasing coat of 1970s flavor.
So now we’re back with Minions 3, a.k.a. Minions & Monsters, and the film has retreated into the problems of the first outing. The attempt to use three specific Minions (all voiced by the director, Pierre Coffin) as the film’s protagonists fares catastrophically, because the entire point of the Minions is that they are indistinguishable dumbass Tic Tac lemmings. Having them as the heart and soul of your adventure does not make for inspired or convincing storytelling.
And yet Minions & Monsters has received not only the strongest reviews of the Despicable Me series to date (it’s the first entry in the franchise to clear 80% on Rotten Tomatoes, edging past the 2010 original) but some actual love from cinephiles who would typically rate the experience of watching a Minions film on par with undergoing a colonoscopy. There is a reason for this: movie lovers are pandered to in Minions & Monsters. I’m not going to lie, some of it worked on me. I did quite a bit of the Rick Dalton pointing meme at the many classic movie references, which stretch from Lumière actualities through ’50s sci-fi drive-in flicks, and occasionally beyond. These are lovingly crafted homages and references, just winking enough to goose a jolt of amused recognition from a viewer with a Letterboxd Patron subscription.
The movie even gets playful with continuity and diegesis. The opening and closing frame story — a museum tour guide (Allison Janney) walking visitors through the history of film — plays like Asteroid City aimed at the Paw Patrol crowd, as the movie’s mise en scene expands and constricts like a Slinky. This is exactly the kind of noggin-scratching fake-cerebral touch that gets you on my good side. Built into the whole affair is an implied (but never actually executed) investigation into why art and storytelling matter in connecting us through eras and civilizations. (For Minions, it is apparently sufficient to gesture in that direction of thematic heft and let you fill in the blanks.)
And yet through all the structural wit and carefully constructed visual quotations, this is still a Minions movie. Watching it still makes you feel like you have recently been concussed. The slapstick and chaos are relentless even when they are inventive, which is fairly often, but a movie cannot subsist on unfiltered mayhem alone. Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton, both heavily referenced in this film, understood that narrative stakes make funny things funnier and make danger actually feel tense and engaging. Minions & Monsters does not lend its audience the basic respect of telling a functional story.
The film’s opening act is a bit of a remake of the first half of the original Minions, with the yellow dum-dums going from one prospective evil overlord to the next and killing each of them by accident. This sequence has some very funny sketches and physical comedy punchlines in it, although it does lampshade the very problem of a Minions-centered movie: These little shits need to be latched on to something to properly function, and even then they sometimes cause more harm than good.
The rest of the movie follows the attempt of a few specific Minions (James, Henry, and Ed) to make a movie in old-time Hollywood, wherein they inadvertently summon real earth-invading monsters that they incorrectly take to be part of their movie’s special effects. The monsters of the title are glossy rubbery creations preordained to be toys sold this Christmastime, and I hated them so much. They do not remotely fit into the aesthetic of old Hollywood. Their names, Goomi (Trey Parker), Howard (Phil LaMarr), and Phillips (Bobby Moynihan) are Lovecraft references (Howard + Phillips = HP), which only widens the gap between how erudite this movie presents itself and how rich it actually is.
The film juggles a bunch of B-plots and supporting characters, most of whom exist for the purpose of one or two punchlines. But the best of these by a country mile is the one where Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a robot alien built as a riff on Gort from The Day the Earth Stood Still, falls in love with Debbie (Zoey Deutch), a human woman who may or may not realize that he is actually an alien and not just a guy dressed up in a costume. This spark of romance causes Dort to accidentally but wholeheartedly become a feminist and a suffragist. It is very funny both in concept and in delivery, and it feels much more like an actual riff on blending old Hollywood style with wacky modern comedy than anything with the stupid monsters or minions.
I did try to talk myself into liking Minions & Monsters as I watched. It would be so, so cool if this were Babylon for elementary schoolers, a fearless tribute to silent form that it executes not with solemn reverence but with a hysterical, almost anguished mania. I mean, how often do movies marketed toward my kids have references to Georges Méliès, Harold Lloyd, Häxan, and The Maltese Falcon? (And also, it so happens, the party in Babylon.) How often do mass-produced kids movies celebrate that the medium even has a 150-year history? That’s cool! I wish I was all in on this effort.
But you can’t put a turd on a sub roll with a pickle spear and call it a sandwich, and you can’t call Minions & Monsters a real movie.
- Review Series: Illumination
Is It Good?
Nearly Good (4/8)
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