Spilling over with indeterminate parody-cum-reenactments of ’20s, ’30s, ’40s and ’50s motion picture nostalgia, this first real effort in galvanizing the slapstick potential of the new century icons, these bumbling, babbling Minions, deeply mismanages the lengths that intelligent physical comedy can pursue — or, at the very least, fails to conceive of a coherent schema through which they can be lucidly animated. After two spin-offs, where these titular jesters have been marginalized to the periphery of narratives that foreground their bosses, Minions & Monsters finally offers a coordinated endeavor to center these gibberish-spewing acolytes as the protagonists of their own story, their fumbling invincibility at the fore of a film that sets their hijinks against the capacity they have to engage in and riff off of the cherry-picked traditions of cinema’s legacy. In this, the creativity of James, the camaraderie of Henry, and the sheer positive force of nature that is Ed, all guide the way for James to realize their dreams of artistic expression. Once a crude painter, capturing the greatness of the minions’ bosses, upon falling into Hollywood James and the gang set their eyes on the moving image, its wonder, and its exploits. In collaboration with Christoph Waltz’s anonymous stand-in for a slew of German expat auteurs, the trio set off to reach heights no Minion has yet achieved, aspiring for the greatness only a big screen might be able to afford.
While this narrative setup offers what might conceptually be a strong platform on which to compose the shenanigans of these wily little fellas, there’s an inhospitable lack of confidence that persists from the preceding films, coursing through this project’s logic. Instead of seeking to choreograph elaborate orchestrations of original, or at the very least clever, visual comedy, we instead are too often thrust through incursive reference after reference: The Horse in Motion, Employees Leaving the Lumière Factory, The Arrival of a Train at La Ciotat Station, A Trip to the Moon, Modern Times, Safety Last!, Steamboat Bill Jr., The Maltese Falcon, and Citizen Kane all make rapid entrance and exit. We must also endure inane and jutting intrusions of line-for-line allusions that carry no dramatic weight, merely a hope to stuff as much down the gullet as fast as can be and as humanely as possible. It’s the residue of our forlorn attention economy, so often imposed onto our growing generations through lecherous contemporary children’s media, that refuses to let any single entity take a breath if it’s not in the service of spectacluarization, an unfunny gag or, simply, plot. Here, it’s a wink to all the adults in the room, who might also be hoping for earnestness in an attempt to contemporize the lunacy of yesteryear’s comedic sensibilities, bringing these Minions into the fray of their clear inspirations. Instead, Minions & Monsters is a grab bag of footnotes and a hodgepodge of classic monster movie narratives: The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob carrying a misguided excess of the weight across a wavering dedication to our core trio of enfants terribles.
It’s clear, through this nihilistic celebration of cinematic legacy, that the Pierre Coffin — the mastermind here, director of the first three Despicable Mes and the first Minions off-shoot — has only his love of the game as any energizing force. Of course, also likely is that the infinite spring of wealth and marketing that Illumination has been able to tap through these allows Coffin to simply pursue a sub-Looney Tunes lane with these these prehistoric yellow beans of ineptitude and villainy. If this isn’t the final nail in the coffin that has slowly readied itself for burial, filled with the hope of us naive yearners for consistent and intelligent slapstick opportunities, than it’s unclear what exactly will do it. Perhaps our next foray into the affairs of our minionese-speaking population will be an austere yet absurd historical fantasy that imagines their placement amongst the greatest crimes against humanity. After all, it’s not such great a stretch: as so quietly and briefly gestured to here, their presence at a British monarch’s side suggests a more in-depth deployment of these wisecrackers in the campaign of our world’s largest colonial empire. And while there were recent comments affirming their absenteeism in Hitler’s campaign, what about Mussolini? Certainly such a development might finally end their reign of partly-unintelligible terror for good.
DIRECTOR: Pierre Coffin; CAST: Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jeff Bridges, Jesse Eisenberg, Zoey Deutch; DISTRIBUTOR: Universal Pictures; IN THEATERS: July 1; RUNTIME: 1 hr. 30 min.
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