Minions & Monsters review: a fresh prequel to the Despicable Me franchise

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Minions & Monsters is in theaters beginning July 1.

You can’t deny the amazing box office success of each film, but if you’re not a little kid, it would be understandable if you’re less than hyped for the third Minions movie, AKA the seventh movie in the larger Despicable Me franchise. After all, what new avenues are there possibly left to explore with little banana-obsessed, gibberish-spouting dudes? And yet lo and behold, Minions & Monsters is here to say “You know what, actually, there is something new that can be done,” taking a rather different approach to its story than the previous entries.

Though it’s Minions lore that these guys essentially go back to the dawn of time, Minions & Monsters actually is set before any movie in the franchise (a few earlier flashbacks in those films aside) and feels almost like a spinoff of a spinoff. It centers on an entirely different group of Minions than we’ve met before, who, after arriving in Los Angeles in the 1920s, end up accidentally becoming silent-era movie stars.

Where the Despicable Me movies have Gru’s relationship with his daughters to give it some ongoing emotional stakes – even as the overall quality of the films has diminished in recent sequels – Minions is more purely driven by the gags. Which makes sense, because usually a Minion is a Minion is a Minion, and their manic, often destructive antics essentially come off as less brutal Gremlins. But Minions & Monsters dares to dream bigger via a Minion who dares to dream bigger in the form of James. James, you see, is an artist, who’s less interested in finding a new evil boss to serve than in documenting, through his drawings, the adventures he and his fellow Minions encounter along the way… Or, when given the opportunity, through moviemaking.

Yes, Minions & Monsters is a movie about the joy of art in general but much more specifically about the joy of moviemaking and moviegoing, which is a surprising turn of events for this series to go in, and yet it’s a frequently clever and funny example of such a thing. Returning director Pierre Coffin (who provides all the Minion voices, per usual) and his fellow screenwriter, Minions veteran Brian Lynch, feel inspired from the start, with the movie tipping its hat from the moment the modern day Universal logo begins to hurtle back in time through its previous incarnations, followed by the Illumination logo reimagined to what it might have looked like had the company existed 100 years ago.

Lo and behold, Minions & Monsters says 'You know what, actually, there is something new that can be done,' taking a rather different approach to its story.

More than ever, Minions & Monsters has jokes and references that will be appreciated by adults on a different and sometimes deeper and funnier level than the kids who will still get their dependable Minion laughs from the bountiful sight gags and slapstick. From animated versions of the likes of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton popping up to direct references and homages to films like Casablanca and Citizen Kane, there’s a lot to appreciate here. It’s a film that earns the tried but true “love letter to cinema” moniker, while also being witty enough to include a line like “We’re not evil anymore! We work in the motion picture industry!”

After a prolonged intro through the ages that both allows us to meet James and his pals, Henry and Ed, and does an even funnier version of the Minions leaving an accidental body count in their wake than the first Minions movie, the storyline really kicks in when the Minions meet Hollywood director Max, warmly and enthusiastically voiced by Christoph Waltz. There’s a lot of strong material involving the Minions becoming the Next Big Thing, including some meta gags about their success, plentiful merchandise included. I just wish the movie wasn’t quite so segmented, because after the Minions’ career is threatened by the addition of sound to film – their gibberish just won’t cut it anymore when it comes to delivering actual dialogue, you see – Max ends up kind of dropping out of the story for the most part, with the latter half not as strongly tethered to the Hollywood-specific elements.

In fact, those early backlot-set scenes are so entertaining that I was dreading the film needing to live up to the second half of its title by eventually bringing some Monsters into the mix. But that portion, while not as standout as what precedes it, is still quite entertaining in its own right, as one of the Minions uses a spell book established in the film’s intro to conjure forth a few ancient beasts in order to use them in a self-made movie, only for that to go about as well as you might imagine.

Is it a little distracting yet also quite funny to hear Trey Parker, who played a different role in Despicable Me 3 , do a voice that’s not quite an exact match but pretty damn close to his Eric Cartman voice as the diminutive, smooth-talking, and Cthulhu-inspired Goomi? It is indeed! The monsters portion of the film also gives us the multi-eyed, oozy orange beast known as Irene, which provides some of the most visually imaginative and trippy aspects of the film, both from watching Irene travel through a vibrant depiction of 1920s LA and then seeing what it’s like when some Minions travel inside Irene, where everything she’s consumed is bobbing about.

In its quest to serve as a tribute to the movies, there’s a lot going on in Minions & Monsters, and it’s almost too much, but it’s to the film’s credit that it mostly all comes together, as frenetic as it all is. That includes a subplot about Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a guy claiming to be an alien robot from space who takes in some of the Minions at his dilapidated apartment, while also wooing an optimistic suffragette named Debbie (Zoey Deutch). And just re-reading that last sentence, it sounds like absolute madness, but the charm of Minions & Monsters is that it manages to interweave all of these bizarre elements.

Dort is a not so thinly veiled homage to Gort, from 1951’s The Day the Earth Stood Still, and while some film snobs may bristle at how Minions & Monsters pulls influences from multiple decades and crams them all into the 1920s, it’s worth remembering… This is a Minions movie! Strict adherence to the exact order of events of history doesn’t need to be a thing. So yeah, in real life, the arrival of sound in movies didn’t immediately lead to 1940s-style noir, but it’s still very funny to see a Minion try to act out a scene of that sort here, along with other Minion-fueled parodies of familiar cinematic tropes.

There’s a specific manic energy to Minions & Monsters, along with its use of early Hollywood visuals and celebrities, that evokes classic Looney Tunes more than any entry in the entire series to date and benefits the film greatly. It’s easily the best movie in the franchise since the first Despicable Me in 2010, and after weighing out the battle between recency bias and nostalgia, I feel as though it ultimately surpasses it.