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Pierre Coffin’s gang of yellow pill-shaped anarchists are back with a helter-skelter third spinoff outing that romps along at a million miles an hour. It’s far more fun and inventive than the Despicable Me franchise the Minions spun out of, not to mention 2022’s Minions: The Rise of Gru, and delivers a barrage of giggles and an unexpected movie history lesson.
This time Coffin and his long-time Minions co-writer Brian Lynch plonk the gang back into the moviemaking era that helped inspire their slapstick: the 1920s Hollywood of Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton. It’s a home run of an idea, right down to the opening montage of old Universal idents and silent film title card. In this alternative cinema timeline, the Minions were there at the birth of the talkies and even assisted in the partial demolition of the old ‘Hollywoodland’ sign. Damien Chazelle’s Babylon gets a reference, as do a flurry of silent classics. Watching the Minions being fed through Modern Times’ industrial cogs or gatecrashing Buster Keaton’s Steamboat Bill, Jr is a joy.
Allison Janney’s authoritative narration provides soothing structure for all the clowning, eye-poking and small explosions. She’s a tour guide shepherding a bunch of school kids through the Academy Museum. After a George Lucas sight gag for the ages, she introduces James and Henry, two pioneering Minion filmmakers from the 1920s, before a historical flashback reestablishes their ceaseless purpose: to find a villain to do take them into service. There’s unexpected overlap with The Odyssey as they take to the oceans and make doomed bids to serve mythical monsters they then accidentally lay waste to.
A time leap introduces the ultimate villains: a pair of Hollywood studio bosses. The Bright Brothers, balloon-shaped twins voiced by Jeff Bridges (think Irving Thalberg crossed with a Space Hopper), and a tyrannical silent cinema director (Christoph Waltz) latch onto the antic energy of the Minions to launch their moviemaking careers. The dawn of the Talkies sends the gang to the monster movie end of the Universal Studios canon, as they summon a deceptively cute Cthulhu-alike monster (Trey Parker) and accidentally lay waste to LA.
To say that an alien named Dort (Jesse Eisenberg) – a riff on Gort from sci-fi The Day the Earth Stood Still – is integral to the final showdown should give a sense of how much movie lore is plundered in the cause of yellow anarchy here. The ending goes a bit Monsters vs Aliens, delivering a generic payoff to all the Criterion Collection lunacy that came before. But for the most part, it’s pure giddy fun – and it may even spark a Letterboxd boom among the under-10s.
In UK and Ireland cinemas now.