Minions (2015)

Originally published July 11, 2015 on FrontRowCentral.com

In a certain sense, Minions is the film I’ve been hoping for years an animation studio would have the balls to make. I always said the Ice Age series should ditch its main characters and build a full feature with no dialogue around its Wile E Coyote-esque squirrel, Scrat. His physical antics are perfect fodder for animation, and I hoped that studio would work up the courage sooner or later to build a full feature around him. Apparently the wrong people were listening, because instead of Scrat we have Minions, a Despicable Me prequel all about the gibbering little blobs that have inexplicably become a marketing phenomenon.

And that’s exactly what this film is: A triumph of advertising over content.

The film opens in the manner of a nature documentary (narrated by Geoffrey Rush) explaining the rise of minions. Most of this stuff you’ve seen in the trailers. Beginning as single-cell organisms in the ocean, minions followed their masters onto dry land, constantly seeking out the most powerful and evil leader they could find. After years of eking out a depressing, leaderless existence in an ice cavern, a minion named Kevin leads comrades Stuart and Bob (all voiced by co-director Pierre Coffin) on an adventure to find a new master and a new purpose for their people. This leads them to Scarlet Overkill: The World’s First Female Supervillain (Sandra Bullock). Scarlet brings the minions to her home in London, where she tasks them with stealing Queen Elizabeth’s crown. When they inevitably screw this up (by accidentally crowning little Bob king of England), Scarlet turns on them and sics the entire villain world upon Kevin, Stuart and King Bob.

Imagine a Muppet movie starring nothing but a hundred Animals, and you’ve got a pretty good idea of how Minions shakes out. There are a few fun sequences, and several events that take place, but nothing that really adds up to an actual plot. It’s all just an excuse for Illumination Entertainment to show us some minion chaos for ninety minutes, which honestly is all this film really needed to be. While much of the script must look like someone randomly smashing their fingers against a keyboard, what’s truly uncanny is the way it still manages to elicit a constant stream of giggles from its audience. Where most Hollywood films dictate some event has to happen every ten-to-fifteen minutes, Minions features a new musical cue, slapfight, montage or mass minion migration every five minutes.

And the musical cues seem particularly important, because there sure are a ton of them. Setting the film in 1968 — oh I forgot to mention, Minions takes place in 1968 — means we get a heavy dose of classic rock tunes, many sung by the minions themselves. The Who, The Kinks, The Beatles, The Monkees, The Turtles, even an anachronistic Van Halen make appearances throughout the film, making the soundtrack a must-own for every family without access to FM radio. Of all the songs littered throughout the film, though, the one that feels most like a focus group patting itself on the back is the all-minions rendition of Singin’ In The Rain’s “Make ‘Em Laugh.” It’s a cute idea, and basically the entire film in one YouTube-ready clip, but they cut to this sequence as a non sequitur, making the whole thing feel like a desperate plea for attention.

Perhaps the most calculated decision in a film full of them is upgrading the minions’ nonsense vocabulary to include a little bit of several different languages. Now Kevin and the rest speak a pidgin hybrid of English, Spanish, French and babytalk, ensuring that kids all over the world will understand Stuart when he holds up a banana and screams, “BANANA!” Minions proves time and again that wild gesticulations and incessant babbling are enough to convey its particular brand of humor, but I guess certain things still need to be explained.

Honestly, Minions’ quality as a feature film is irrelevant. This movie will have an audience for as long as people have eyes affixed to their skulls. And long after the film’s humor has worn off, people will continue to watch it in order to study its brain-scrambling allure. For as often as it fails at basic things like narrative, it still succeeds in its mission to turn kids and adults alike into giggling idiots. I endured Minions, and even enjoyed parts of it, but its very existence feels like the work of a supervillain accidentally exposing their master plan. If any of you readers out there happen to be aspiring megalomaniacs, you really should see Minions, because as it turns out, this film is an insidious blueprint for how to make a billion dollars.