Nate At The Movies

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS SPOILERS.

When Despicable Me 4 was about to come out two years ago, I rewatched all of the Despicable Me movies and unfortunately realized that the franchise has only gotten worse over the years. In my opinion, Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 are the only good movies in the larger Despicable Me universe—once the girls got phased out and the minions phased in, the quality cratered. I’m really not a fan of the two previous Minions movies, especially The Rise of Gru, so I was going into Minions & Monsters tonight with very little hope. Imagine my surprise, then, when I ended up liking much of what this (still imperfect) movie was doing.

The premise of this movie was baffling, to say the least—the minions stumble into Hollywood in search of their next big boss, only to become movie stars—but the first half of the story was legitimately pretty fun. There were plenty of old Hollywood references for adults and parents to enjoy, and a lot of the minion hijinks worked on me. I said this in my review of the first Minions movie, too, but I actually like this direction the Minions franchise is going in: what were the minions up to before Gru? That idea has really been a blank canvas, and though this premise didn’t seem like it was going to land, I thought the minions in Hollywood worked pretty well.

Unfortunately, the solid execution of the first half only lasted for the first half. Once Goomi and the monsters were introduced, the story lost its uniqueness. It also felt like this movie got approved without the writers knowing what the ending would be; the second half flew by and threw some odd things at the wall. Though I appreciated that the minions not interested in moviemaking were still given something to do (this franchise has had a problem with sidelining good characters), Dort and his suffragette girlfriend were a really weird addition. I won’t get into the anachronism of Debby—why are there still suffragettes in the same decade as talkies and the Oscars?—but Dort was just an odd character. The ending with all of the UFOs was dumb, too; I get that it connected, but usually that kind of “side character swoops in to save the day” ending is more thematically or emotionally relevant. This was so random!

Despite its shortcomings, I actually kind of liked Minions & Monsters. The movie references were fun to point out, the minion humor (and heavy minionese scenes) worked on me more than I thought it would, and the music from John Powell was way too good for this movie. Minions & Monsters was definitely not the worst Minions movie, and I might actually put it near the middle of my Despicable Me universe ranking. I do wish, though, that this movie had tried anything emotionally challenging or complex. Illumination has long been a frustrating animation studio for me: they make so much money and usually just turn around and use that money to make more slop. I so badly want them to put their best people on a really sincere and impressive movie, but unless Not Alone is the one to turn the tide, I don’t think it’ll be happening anytime soon.