‘Minions & Monsters’ Review: Pierre Coffin’s ‘Zelig’-like Love Letter to Old Hollywood

With Minions & Monsters, Pierre Coffin uses the adorable titular characters that he voices to pay tribute to silent comedians, classic film genres, and the communal theatrical experience. From the get-go, the film sets itself apart from prior entries in the Despicable Me series with its aesthetic playfulness. After the modern Universal Pictures logo hits the screen, the image begins to rewind, running through all of the studio’s logos all the way back to the 1910s. The Illumination logo that follows even shows the Minions in “rubber hose” style, setting the tone for many more nods to cinematic and animation history to come.

The story proper opens with a framing device, with a Universal Studios tour guide (Allison Janney) introducing the group she’s leading to two particular Minions, James and Henry, as forgotten pioneers of early Hollywood. Cue the flashbacks to their origin story, which sees several Minions inserted into everything from Eadweard Muybridge’s “The Horse in Motion” and Georges Méliès’s “A Trip to the Moon” to the Lumiere brothers’ “Workers Leaving a Factory” and “The Sprinkler Sprinkled,” widely considered the first comedy ever made.

This Zelig-like journey through film history arrives at a cohesive narrative after the Minions stumble onto a western film set and try to help the escaping villain succeed in his train robbery, seeing him as a new evil master to serve. The resulting chaos, of course, marks the collective of mischievous little mumblers as potential stars. But unlike the rest of the Minions, James, Henry, and new buddy Ed are the only ones who primarily see cinema as the master they’d permanently like to serve, with the help of European expat director Max (Christoph Waltz).

The rest of the film’s first half proceeds as an exuberant celebration of the next 20 years of Hollywood history, with explicit references to Safety Last!, Steamboat Bill Jr., Modern Times, and Citizen Kane, among others. However funny some of them are, there’s not a ton of depth to these various nods, but in this era where A.I. is proliferating throughout society and risk-averse corporate entities are thumbing their nose at cinema history, the film’s highlighting of the geniuses and craftsmen of yesteryear becomes something of a radical act.

Once the Minions get the boot from Hollywood not long into the sound era, Minions & Monsters begins to walk a more well-trod path—that is, it starts to behave a lot like the other Despicable Me films. While James and Henry set about to make their return to Hollywood with a monster movie, the rest of the Minions find themselves working with an alien robot, Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), intent on taking over the world after being mistreated by a group of tough guys.

Dort’s presence does lead to a handful of fun scenes inspired by low-budget 1950s sci-fi films, but the character is saddled with a non-starter of a love story with a spunky suffragette named Debbie (Zoey Deutch). At this point, over halfway through the film, James and Henry summon Goomi (Trey Parker), a creature resembling a Funko Pop version of Cthulhu, who after finally being freed promises to help them make their monster movie. These two newly introduced storylines not only feel tacked on, but they’re given no room to breathe.

Things, of course, go haywire for both sets of Minions, and Minions & Monsters continues to build to an extended action climax that, while moderately engaging, feels like something we’ve seen before in other modern-day animated films. Still, the film does at least freshen up the series formula, slyly using the kid-favorite Minions to smuggle in a celebratory message about the theater-going experience and the enduring power of cinema.