Minions & Monsters

Grade: B+

Minions & Monsters confirmed a sneaking suspicion I’ve had: these little yellow creatures are growing on me. I’m becoming a fan. Their language is a hybrid of broken English, broken Spanish, broken Italian, and mostly their own invented gibberish. I still have trouble differentiating them into distinct characters, but it’s a delight to find that I can always understand what they’re communicating to each other, even when they don’t use real words most of the time. I no longer find them despicable.

This is a story within a story. On the stage, you’d call that a “memory play.” After an opening montage that inserts the Minions into various classic silent films, Allison Janney provides the voice of a tour guide for a museum of cinema history. After either glossing over – or completely bypassing – exhibits featuring E.T., The Matrix, George Lucas, and Orson Welles, she stops at the obvious main attraction: Minions James and Henry, the two main players of the story she tells the group.

I normally resist voice-over narration, but Janney has a command of the text – successfully calling upon her film, TV, and Broadway experience to paint the picture for us. The Minions are traveling the world in search of an evil master to serve. They eventually stumble into old-school Los Angeles, where the Hollywoodland sign still overlooks the city. After lucking into the movie business, they become overnight silent-film stars. But when talking pictures arrive and their speech patterns make them unable to adapt, they lose their contract and are evicted from their mansion.

Like the best episodes of The Simpsons in its heyday, Minions & Monsters rewards the viewers who know their trivia and pay attention. It is filled to the brim with sight gags and references to the sociopolitical and pop culture climate of the time. I took 2015’s Minions to task for cramming so many needle-drops from the classic rock songbook. I felt it was trying to compensate for what was otherwise a hollow, annoying film. Refreshingly, Minions & Monsters doesn’t go that route. The eclectic score does a lot of heavy lifting, constantly changing styles based on whatever genre it’s sending up.

I laughed frequently, such as when a stuffy, corpulent Hollywood executive sees something that upsets him, and then orders an assistant to prepare him the most meticulously specific cup of coffee imaginable. He throws it on the floor without drinking it. All those special instructions, only to use it as a prop to signify his anger in a slapstick bit. 

A few subplots are introduced in the second half. Nothing is just a tangent. If you’re wondering why we’re seeing certain things, just keep watching. By the end, they all have something to do with each other. Messages and metaphors, particularly when it comes to the state of cinema, are planted within the movie, with varying degrees of subtlety. Janney’s character makes an extremely deliberate point of stressing how nothing can beat the experience of seeing a film in a theater. Also, I can’t be the only one who caught that this whole time, the Minions were looking for an evil master to serve, and they landed on Hollywood.

The movie has one final rug-pull in store for us in the last couple of minutes. I’m not sure it completely holds up to scrutiny, but come on. This ain’t exactly the JFK assassination – this is the 7th Minions movie, not meant to be analyzed or dissected too much. I had a great time at Minions & Monsters, and this is the most eager I’ve been for more.

Grade: B+