Like a sillier “Singin’ in the Rain” or a more restrained “Babylon,” “Minions & Monsters’ is at heart a love letter to the golden age of Hollywood. Or, at least, the banana-yellow age of Hollywood.
Minions creator Pierre Coffin has made no secret of how his pill-shaped animated rascals in the “Despicable Me” and “Minions” movies were inspired by the slapstick comedy of the Three Stooges, Laurel & Hardy and more. But “Monsters” is a surprisingly deep dive into cinematic history while still retaining the comic mayhem that younger fans crave. Who on earth expected a Minions movie to open with a faithful homage to Georges Méliès’ 1902 classic “A Trip To The Moon”?
Full disclosure: I’ve had a soft spot for the Minions for a while, and not just because I once appeared on a live episode of “Judge John Hodgman” wearing a pair of Minions pajama shorts. (Long story.) One of my favorite moviegoing memories was taking my oldest daughter, then six years old, to the first “Despicable Me” movie in 2010 and hear her laugh uncontrollably about the “fart gun” joke all the way back to the car afterwards.
But the subsequent movies have pretty much gone in one ear and out the other - repetitive, inoffensive kids’ movies that I’m hard-pressed to remember afterward. “Monsters” stuck a little more, with Coffin’s evident deep love for classic movies elevating the sometimes disjointed, but always zippy on-screen antics. One chase scene crams in earnest homages to Harold Lloyd, Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. How can you turn up your nose at that?
This is a movie where some of the references are going way over the heads of not just the kids but most adults who don’t watch Turner Classic Movies on a regular basis. But there’s enough slapstick and silly jokes crammed in there to please viewers of any age.
For the uninitiated, the Minions aren’t evil, actually – their purpose in life is just to serve the biggest, baddest supervillains they can find. The opening scenes find themselves adhering to various baddies – a cyclops in Ancient Greece, a wizard in medieval times – always enthusiastically messing things up for their bosses.
Then they get to 1920s Hollywood, where they stumble onto a Western movie shoot and mistake an actor playing a bandit for a real villain. They destroy the shoot in spectacular fashion, to the consternation of the director (Christoph Waltz). But studio heads the Bright Brothers (both played by Jeff Bridges) see box office potential in those “little sickly children,” and signs them all up. This thrills two of the Minions, James and Henry (both voiced by Coffin), who have dreams of making movies themselves.
This leads to some very funny parodies where the Minions are inserted into classic movies (I probably laughed way too loudly in the theater at the “Citizen Kane” gag). This is a movie where some of the references are going way over the heads of not just the kids but most adults who don’t watch Turner Classic Movies on a regular basis. But there’s enough slapstick and silly jokes crammed in there to please viewers of any age.
Like Lina Lamont in “Singing’ in the Rain,” though, the Minions have trouble making the transition from silent films to talkies. Mostly because they speak in an incomprehensible gumbo of foreign languages known as Minionese.
After the Minions are kicked off the studio lot, the plot spins off in different directions. James and Henry try to make their own movie, a Godzilla-style monster movie with the help of a pint-sized demon (Trey Parker) hiding his own secret agenda. Meanwhile, the other Minions sign up with a new boss, a dorky robot named Dort (Jesse Eisenberg) who pledges world domination.
At times, the second half of “Monsters” feels like several Minions shorts threaded into each other. But Coffin and co-writer Brian Lynch more or less pull all the strands together in the movie’s frantically gooey finale – gooey in the sense of actual fluids, and in the film’s sentimental and sincere ode to the shared moviegoing experience. And they do it all in a breezy 90 minutes.
“Minions & Monsters” is the best entry since the original “Despicable Me,” and Coffin’s love of cinema gives his movie a beating heart that’s hard to resist. Can’t wait to see the Minions tackle the French New Wave in the next one.
“Minions & Monsters” opens Wednesday in theaters. In Madison, it will play at Marcus Point, Marcus Palace, AMC Fitchburg 18 and Flix Brewhouse Madison.