MINIONS – The Review

Those goggle-eyed scene-stealers from DESPICABLE ME (and its sequel) get their own showcase in MINIONS, a colorful, fast-paced prequel that kids will have fun with but fails to soar to the heights of the original films. The funniest bits in MINIONS are the opening scenes (we saw them in the trailer) with Minions throughout history disastrously serving the most despicable baddies they can find; a T-Rex, a Pharaoh, Dracula, Napoleon, etc. The story then jumps ahead to 1968, when three brave minions, Bob, Kevin, and Stuart, leave their tribe in the Antarctic to find a new Archfiend to assist. After a brief stop in New York City, the boys travel to ‘Villain Con’, a supervillain convention in Florida where they meet and get jobs working for Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock). She, along with her husband Herb (John Hamm) whisks the three off to England with the assignment of stealing for her the Crown Jewels from the Queen. They muff that job but accidentally wind up ruling the country, which doesn’t sit well with the Overkills.

MINIONS has plenty of laughs but plays more like a series of frantic visual gags than a fully developed story. There’s a lot of fun to be had with the period music and references to Nixon, the moon landing, and the Swinging London of that time period. I’m not sure small children will laugh when the Minions pop out of a sewer lid on Abbey Road just as the Beatles are making their famous crossing, but I did. Voiced by the film’s directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda jabbering in a helium-fueled garble, the Minions are pure slapstick gold, but MINIONS lacks the heart of the first two films. I think the little banana-loving gremlins work best when they’re comedy relief on the edges of the actual story, not front and center like they are here. They also need a good super-villain to work off of and Sandra Bullock’s Scarlet is no Gru. She’s given little to do besides standard cartoon stuff like cackle and scream and shoot her lava lamp gun from her flying machine. Worse is Jon Hamm, not funny at all as Scarlet’s creepy, unnecessary husband.  The film gets bogged down when it becomes the Overkill’s story, making the 91-minute running time seem longer. I wish the central villains had been the Nelsons, a wacky American family on a cross-country crime spree that picks up the hitchhiking Minions in their station wagon early in the film. Ma and Pa Nelson are voiced by Allison Janney and Michael Keaton and what they pull off with their brief screen time is far more hilarious than anything Bullock and Hamm do. If the producers of MINIONS make another spin-off film, they’d be wise to bring back the Nelsons.

3 of 5 Stars