The Yellow Terrors Hit a Creative High

From “Sunset Boulevard” to “The Artist,” “Singin’ in the Rain” to “Babylon,” Hollywood’s transition to sound cinema has long been a fertile period for later film artists to recreate with all the more evolved tools at their disposal — and so it proves, most happily and improbably, for the Minions. The frenetic antics of Illumination‘s mascot army of yellow miscreants have always been indebted to vintage slapstick. So in the creatures’ third collective solo feature, director, writer and voice artist Pierre Coffin makes that influence official, explicitly referencing the likes of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd in an adventure that quite logically see the Minions become silent comedy stars — “logically,” of course, being a relative term in this antic story universe — only for their trademark gibberish speaking style to ruin the dream. 

The result — for whatever it’s worth to steadfast fans of this 19-year-old and entirely critic-proof series, or indeed target audience members who weren’t remotely alive when 2015’s “Minions” came out — is a clear peak for the series: a Minions movie with an actual idea at its core beyond general cheerful chaos, and proof that the pill-shaped devils are served better as stars than as sidekicks. 2022’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru” once more anchored them to their old “Despicable Me” overlord, and felt like a step backwards; they’re most interesting when they swarm the screen to the exclusion of all else, like an eleventh plague so unholy that the Bible didn’t list it. The new film delivers grandly on that front: Small children will be cackling and incoherently quoting the film for weeks, and their parents might even chuckle at the reminder.

“Minions & Monsters” is also the first feature in the franchise to be directed solo by Coffin, the Frenchman who co-created the Minions to begin with — and who still voices every last one of them, in their distinctive dialect that fuses toddler babble with pidgin versions of multiple European languages, to frequently unparsable but oddly understandable effect. (Certain interjections stand out: “Bellissima!” is one. “Moviosa!” is another. If the film can get a generation of tots to shriek “Moviosa!” at random intervals, it will have done more for the culture than most of this summer’s blockbusters.) 

In any case, it seems Coffin’s full creative leadership makes the difference: In its first half, in particular, the film feels pleasingly and exuberantly unsupervised, untethered to a studio template, as it runs riot with cinephile-specific sight gags and freestyle plotting that sometimes nests movies within movies. Following opening titles that cleverly rewind through vintage Universal Studios idents until we’re in the 1920s, we begin with an amusing if slightly extraneous framing device, as a Universal tour guide (voiced by Allison Janney) marches a gaggle of marvelling children and parents through a gallery of studio memorabilia — cue one very good George Lucas joke — before arriving at the story of James and Henry, two Minion mischief-makers who were also, would you believe it, Hollywood moviemaking pioneers.

As we flash back to their tale, the pair are differentiated early from the horde by their shared rebellious streak — too anarchic even for their brethren, it turns out — and a devoted sense of kinship that ensures all the ensuing hijinks are underpinned by a genuine sweetness. They bond as the group sails the globe in search of villainous masters to serve and accidentally kill in raucously comic, PG-rated ways: Somehow the good-natured but quite grisly violence of these films always comes as a surprise and a bit of a tonic. (One summary beheading is a genuine scream; so is a death by prehistoric Lego brick, carved from stone and agonisingly stepped on.)

The Minions’ travels eventually land them, by chance, in Old Hollywood, where they unwittingly disrupt the shoot of a Roy Rodgers-style western — in a breathlessly galloping action sequence that somehow shifts gears from frenzied desert horse chase to runaway-train disaster movie, and stands as a coup de cinéma in its own right. The film’s director, uptight Euro expat Max (Christoph Waltz), is initially enraged by their hijacking of the shoot, but his studio fatcat bosses (both voiced by Jeff Bridges) love the unhinged results. The Minions become overnight silver-screen sensations — headlining a multitude of quickly produced silent comedies and genre films, and living large in a vast, tricked-out mansion at the studio’s expense.

This is the film’s richest passage of both storytelling and sustained, solid-gold humor, awash in loving film references (“Modern Times,” “Safety Last!” and an anachronistic “Citizen Kane” are among the classics that come in for pastiche treatment) and mile-a-minute visual jokes. (A favorite: a passing poster for a Minions thriller titled “Look Behind You, and Then Down.”) One wishes we got a bit more of the Minions-as-movie-stars era, since once sound cinema crashes the industry and and the unintelligible critters are out on their ear, “Minions & Monsters” does rather lose momentum.

Splitting the group and saddling the bulk of them with cowardly robot Dort (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) yields less consistent comic rewards; a sketchy romantic subplot pairing Dort with strong-willed suffragette Debbie (Zoey Deutch) is a stab at adult engagement that should been left in the first draft. James’ dream of helming his own Universal monster movie is a far more enticing possibility, but the execution — which sees him summoning destructive beasts via literal movie magic — yields more noisy mayhem than wit. As the film swells toward a frenzied save-the-world battle against evil forces the Minions would finally rather beat than join, it feels less like a film-lovers’ playground and more like, well, another Minions movie. 

Fair enough: That’s what the people want, and “Minions & Monsters” serves it up with gusto and a delirious cartoon grin. And even as it ultimately bends to convention, the film is such a weird, willful popular entertainment for much of its (blessedly snappy) running time that it holds your goodwill: It’s almost bellissima but it’s fully, madly moviosa, and that’s more than the seventh entry in any animated franchise has a right to be.