By Mark Fields
Frenetic Sensibility Drives Latest Entry in Franchise
The little yellow, lozenge-shaped chaos agents first introduced as oft-ineffective henchmen in Despicable Me have managed to capture pop culture’s attention to the point where they have now three animated features for which they are the multi-focal point. The latest, Minions & Monsters, continues the formula that has been so successful in the past: come up with a basic premise and then let them loose collectively to wreak havoc. However, Minions & Monsters also manages to evoke the history of early Hollywood in an unexpectedly thoughtful way that thrills this particular film historian.
Minions & Monsters is really two quite different movies that have been awkwardly stitched together. The first, as mentioned, pays homage to iconographic movie moments with the minions Zeliged into every frame (with shout-outs to Chaplin, Keaton, the Keystone Kops, and even Citizen Kane); the second plays a little less confidently as an extended space monster tribute, leaning especially on the 1951 classic The Day the Earth Stood Still. It almost feels like the filmmakers had two separate ideas, neither of which were substantial enough to be a full-length feature, and so they grafted them together. Both ideas are clever and laugh-out-loud funny, just not especially cohesive.
The voice talent uniformly delights with characters portrayed by Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Trey Parker, and Jesse Eisenberg, just to name a few. As in all their previous movies, the minions are all voiced by Pierre Coffin in a truly humorous amalgamation of multiple foreign languages and flat-out gibberish. The abundant film references are heartwarming for movie buffs, but fleeting enough to brush past the kids in the audience. The pacing is expectedly brisk and efficient.
One final issue with the film is the frenetic energy of the minions themselves. As peripheral characters in the Gru movies, their appetite for mayhem amuses and diverts. But putting them at the center of a story may be too much of a good thing, because 90 relentless minutes of their anarchy eventually exhausts the viewer (at least this one). I left the theater with a smile on my face…and also a bit of a little yellow headache.
Official Trailer
