Minions & Monsters
Chaos reigns once again at the multiplex as the yellow munchkins descend on Hollywood to wreak their singular brand of destruction.
Hooray for havoc!
Image courtesy of Universal Pictures.
by JAMES CAMERON-WILSON
The entire raison d'être of the little yellow gigglers is to serve the most powerful, evil and destructive leaders that they can find. Today, of course, they would have a heyday, with so many self-centred tyrants around, from Putin and Netanyahu to Trump and Mojtaba Khamenei. But Minions & Monsters, the seventh animated film to feature the exasperating creatures, is set in 1927 during the Golden Age of Hollywood. An obsequious tour guide (voiced by Allison Janney) pays her respects to the Minions, explaining their place in the cinematic firmament to a gaggle of baffled tourists and children. But before their story begins in earnest, we learn more of their backstory as they inadvertently destroy the leaders they seek to serve: Cyclops, The Mummy, a Chinese emperor, and so on. Then, when they team up with a warlock, they manage to unleash a monster from the wizard’s book of spells that promptly kills him, too. Naughty Minions. In the desert they witness a robber fleeing on horseback and decide to go to his aid, unaware that the whole thing is actually a scene being filmed for a big-budget silent Western. You see, the Minions are as ignorant of moving pictures as the children in the museum are of the Minions.
As it happens, the Bright brothers (Jeff Bridges and Jeff Bridges), who run the studio, are actually impressed with the unconventional addition to the sequence and soon the Minions are the toast of the town. Cue the introduction of a whole slew of scenes from vintage Hollywood classics which the Minions become a part of, be they starring opposite Charlie Chaplin (in Modern Times, which actually came much later) or Harold Lloyd (Safety Last). These moments will delight some movie buffs, and perhaps infuriate others. And while things start swimmingly enough, the monsters summoned up earlier descend on Los Angeles to reduce the movie capital to rubble.
With the franchise’s appeal to children of all ages, it is more than a touch worrisome that such wholesale destruction is laid out for our entertainment. The yella fellas thrive on the devastation they cause, because it’s really fun to kick over the next kid’s sandcastle. Even in the prologue, in which Cyclops stomps on people’s homes to glees of laughter, seems problematic. After the positive message of Toy Story 5, this seems like a slap in the face, and a retrograde lurch backwards, this being a film that encourages the young to be wayward – all in the worst possible taste. It’s also essentially a one-joke premise, albeit set in different time frames and locations, with barely a smidgen of wit. If anybody should take credit for driving the comic momentum of this mess, it is the composer John Powell, threading the tune of Whiting’s ‘Hooray For Hollywood’ throughout the shenanigans. Every shift in emotion and every gag is manipulated by the score – until the derivative conclusion, which cannot even touch the climax of James Gunn’s The Suicide Squad(2021), which it duplicates.
Voices of Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr, George Lucas, Laraine Newman.
Dir Pierre Coffin, Pro Chris Meledandri and Bill Ryan, Screenplay Brian Lynch and Pierre Coffin, Ed Gregory Perler, Music John Powell, Sound Jeremy Bowker.
Universal Pictures/Illumination-Universal Pictures.
89 mins. USA. 2026. UK and US Rel: 1 July 2026. Cert. U..
