Minions and Monsters With Movies and Mayhem

Ladies and gentleminions, get ready for a henchman-centric, attention-addled story about those adorable pill-shaped yellow characters and their chronic need to find an evil villain to support. Minions and Monsters is for the most part, a sweetly anarchic valentine to the silent film era (imagine a kid-friendly version of Damien Chazelle’s bacchanalian Babylon but without all the cocaine use and dead whores) grafted onto an uninspired mash-up of ’50s movies The Day the Earth Stood Still and The Blob. It’s a mess, essentially, but mostly a good-natured one that’s easy on the eyes and worth a few belly laughs.

Minions and Monsters ★★★ (3/5 stars)
Directed by: Pierre Coffin
Written by: Brian Lynch, Pierre Coffin
Starring: Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr
Running time: 90 mins

“Da movies! Para mi?” asks guileless imp James (Pierre Coffin). Yes, James, para ti. (If, by the way, you aren’t familiar with the minions’ kooky pidgin Esperanto, consider this movie a Dualingo-worthy crash course.) James and his best friend Henry (also Coffin, like all the minions) are the misfits in their tribe of mischief makers, a group desperate to find and serve what they call the “Bad Boss.” Over centuries, they have been minions for a Cyclops named Poot, along with a wizard with a book of dark conjuring spells, and—very briefly—a mummy, a pirate, a British king and a Chinese emperor. James being James, he sabotages all of their leaders and ends up accidently killing lots of them. Oops!

After plaguing Europe and Asia, these chaos agents then find themselves in the Wild West, where a black-clothed cowboy holding a bag of loot is making his getaway on a train. They follow him relentlessly—a new Bad Boss!—and, overwhelming the situation, end up chasing him all the way into Los Angeles, while James and Henry hijack the train and drive it off its rails right into downtown Hollywood. Turns out that the bad cowboy was actually an actor! Cinephiles, keep an eye out for quick shots of Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd, and Buster Keaton as the minions invade the sets of Modern Times, Safety Last! and Steamboat Bill, Jr. in quick succession. Da movies!

Teutonic director Max (Christoph Walz, naturally), whose cameraman kept filming throughout, accidentally captured all the destructive hijinks on celluloid. Frank and Elwood (Jeff Bridges), the zaftig twins running Bright Brothers Pictures, love it and demand more. So the minions become breakout stars of the silver screen, amassing a fortune, moving into a huge Beverly Hills mansion, putting their imprints in the cement at Grauman’s Chinese Theater and otherwise becoming all the rage in the Roaring Twenties.

The only hitch: the studios start making sound pictures. And no one wants to hear people speak minionese. Cut to a highlights reel of a Humphrey Bogart-style minion suavely say “lasagna,” a mortally wounded minion doughboy in All Quiet on the Western Front say “chihuahua,” and, course, a dying Charles Foster Kane minion drop his snow globe and mutter, “Oh poop. Bikini!”

They’re all swiftly fired from the movies, evicted from their home, and thrown on the streets. But James, a budding filmmaker, has a “Eureka!” moment when he comes up with a plan to shoot his own movie: Minions y Monstras. “A real passion project!” explains a sympathetic Max, who loves the pitch and gives them a camera to shoot it. Only problem is that they need a monster. So the mute minion Ed, surprises the rest by pulling out that book of dark conjuring spells that he stole from the wizard all those years ago. And they conjure what looks to be a terrifying Chthulu-inspired creature who turns out to be an adorable little green Lovecraftian fella with a squeak-toy head named Gary Orcam Oliver Magma Ichabod the Deceiver—otherwise shortened to just Goomi (Trey Parker).

Meanwhile, the other minions have left James, Henry, and Ed to follow a promising new leader named Dort (Jesse Eisenberg). He’s a robot from outer space who wants to enslave humanity and weirdly lives in a ramshackle apartment with a slacker roommate named Floyd. Also, a suffragette named Debbie (Zoey Deutch) falls in love with him. None of this makes any sense, which is why this seems to be the very clear point at which the filmmakers behind Monsters and Minions stopped giving a shit.

Being a deceiver, Goomi wreaks havoc by tricking James and Henry into unleashing the cute-scary beasts Phillips (Bobby Moynihan) and Howard (Phil LaMarr), as well as an enormous orange gelatinous creature with thousands of eyes called Irene the Eater of Worlds. Watch out, L.A.! Mayhem ensues, followed by lots of property damage and the obligatory sight gag of the “land” in the original Hollywoodland sign being demolished.

Too bad Minions and Monsters felt obliged to go so over-the-top. What starts as a modest but cute series of Hooray-for-Hollywood jokes becomes a world-on-the-brink bore. But at least we know George Lucas is game to be an animated character trapped in a glass museum box. And that “miso soup” is one of many new phrases in minionese.