‘Minions & Monsters’ Review: Illumination’s Mascots Prove Surprisingly Charming in a Golden Age of Hollywood-Inspired Throwback

When TikTok feeds were flooded with videos of hordes of teen and college-aged boys wearing formal suits to screenings of “Minions: The Rise of Gru” in 2022, the punchline wasn’t just that they were dressing like they were at a wedding for a children’s movie. It was specifically that they were going all out for something as lame and as played out as the Minions, the sidekicks from Illumination‘s “Despicable Me” franchise who transcended that (largely decent) animated film series to become merchandising juggernauts and the subjects of endless Facebook memes.

Backlash to the yellow pill-shaped cartoons — with their nonsense dialogue and character design that felt boardroom-tested for maximum cuteness — was inevitable, and for a while, the Minions were practically synonymous with everything wrong with an animated film market that rewarded memeable characters over heartfelt art.

Nowadays, though, the animation industry has, shall we say, bigger existential concerns facing its existence, and the Minions — who are at least man-made irritants — suddenly seem a lot more palatable. If one were galaxy-brained enough, they could call 2026 the year of the “Minions” cultural redemption; “Despicable Me” screenwriter Cinco Paul recently won two Tony Awards for his TV-to-stage musical comedy “Schmigadoon!,” while Kyle Balda, who helmed the first two “Minions” spinoff films, just made the well-received family-friendly comedy “The Sheep Detectives.”

The feather in the cap is “Minions & Monsters,” the third movie starring the Minions and easily the best, a shockingly delightful madcap comedy that feels like it could convert even the most staunch Minions hater into, if not necessarily a fan, at least a begrudging admirer. The trick director Pierre Coffin (who also provides all the high-pitched voices of the film’s central horde of Minions) and his co-screenwriter Brian Lynch land on to make the characters’ antics more charming is genuinely inspired, textually connecting their slapstick to the very roots of moviemaking for a film packed with references to silent film icons like Charlie Chaplin and Buster Keaton.

The results run out of steam a bit in the second half, when the “Monsters” part of the title begins to rear its head and its Golden Age of Hollywood spoof elements get pushed to the back burner. But in its first 45 minutes or so, “Minions & Monsters” is easily the best this franchise has ever gotten since the first “Despicable Me.”

‘Minions & Monsters’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

A story of the transition from silent cinema to talkies in the vein of “Singin’ in the Rain” or “Babylon,” “Minions & Monsters” tells a completely self-contained tale about a new trio of Minions, a race of beings whose goal is to serve humanity’s greatest villains (previous franchise installments have established the entire race was trapped in a cave for the entire 1940s, to avoid the implications of serving one especially awful villain). James is an artistic, passionate Minion, and Henry, his supportive best friend; they, and mute Minion Ed, who converses via a form of sign language, are outcasts in their tribe, thanks to their tendency to ruin their posts and often outright kill their newest “big boss” — most comically, via a surprisingly explicit beheading.

As regaled in a slightly overly intrusive framing device in which a tour guide named Olivia (Allison Janey) gives a presentation of Henry and James’ history at a film museum — which is worth it mostly for a great cameo appearance from George Lucas — the trio’s tribe, led by the obnoxious and appropriately-named Dick, crosses the desert and wind up in Los Angeles, where they stumble onto a film set and become the inadvertent stars of a comic Western. The diminutive director Max (Christoph Waltz) is initially horrified, but his bosses, studio heads the Bright Brothers (Jeff Bridges), are enamored by their wacky antics, and the Minions soon become the biggest stars of Hollywood. They move into a swanky mansion, amass hordes of adoring fans, and star in films ranging from horror to sci-fi to romance. It’s a particularly exciting development for sweet James, who gets taken under the wing of Max and starts dreaming of winning an Oscar — which, in his imagination, takes the form of a golden banana statue, but nonetheless is a big step in the sensitive dreamer’s ambitions.

The early parts of “Minions & Monsters” feel strategically designed to target the nostalgia and tastes of cinephiles who would otherwise scoff at the prospect of seeing a “Minions” film. And if it may be pandering, well, at least there’s novelty to a kids’ movie that’s willing to pluck from reference points from over 100 years before the kids it’s aimed at were even born. Coffin and Lynch are clearly having a blast pulling from the annals of film history, opening the movie with a logo gag that rewinds the Universal globe back to the 1920s, followed by a “Forrest Gump”-esque montage of the very earliest silent films, from “Workers Leaving the Lumière Factory” to “Voyage to the Moon,” with the Minions running amok.

Illumination’s typically bland animation style — with round, soft character designs that rarely stand out from each other — gets some added juice from the period film conceit, mixing in polished animation with scenes replicating vintage film stock and silent film techniques, such as a wildly sped-up chase scene. The Minions’ physical comedy also feels much more palatable and inspired here, with an early chase scene aboard a train visually nodding to the iconic housefront gag in “Steamboat Bill, Jr.” By situating the story in Hollywood, the film also occasionally comments on the Minions’ real-life stardom, with lighthearted self-jabs at the franchise’s merchandising empire that feel refreshingly self-aware.

Most inspired in the film’s meta-look at the Minions’ cultural omnipresence is how the inevitable collapse of their stardom occurs. When the advent of sound rolls around, and the yellow pills are suddenly expected to carry stories with real dialogue, their efforts fail thanks to their inability to speak anything but their own Minionise dialect, a more extreme version of the fate that befell the obnoxiously voiced Lina in “Singin’ in the Rain.” It leads to the best joke in the whole film, a loving recreation of the opening of “Citizen Kane” where Orson Welles is swapped out for a Minion. It also coyly turns the weakest part of the Minions’ whole deal — their constant pattering which exists to fill silence rather than complementing the story — into one of the film’s key strengths.

‘Minions & Monsters’©Universal/Courtesy Everett Collection

Unfortunately, the Minions’ exile from Hollywood is the point where the film’s Golden Age of Hollywood inspirations mostly get pushed to the background. Abandoned by the rest of their group, the central trio decides to get back into Hollywood by making James’ dream project, a giant monster disaster movie. Using a book Ed picked up in one of their earlier adventures, they summon the dreaded Goomi (“South Park” creator Trey Parker), a surprisingly diminutive Cthulhu squid creature, to their realm, and he agrees to make their film in is what’s quite transparently a ruse to reawaken his monster tribe and destroy the world.

This story pivot isn’t a complete bust, exactly; there’s some fun in how the film swaps Silent Age cinema inspiration for ’50s sci-fi in its climax, with nods toward “The Blob” and “The Day the Earth Stood Still.” But it simply lacks the invention of the film’s first half, largely surrendering the fun of its looser, freewheeling showbiz storyline for a more conventional and expected story about saving the world. As the film gets marginally more serious, it also has to rely more on James, Ed, and Henry as characters, and while their friendships are cute, the Minions as is are inherently limited as far as avatars for dramatic gravitas. Goomi and his crew prove a bit generic as well, although its fun to hear Parker use the same exact voice he does for Eric Cartman in a kids’ movie.

The highlight of the third act isn’t really the main action, but instead subplot in which the remainder of the Minions fall into the orbit of a sad sack alien robot Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), who came to Earth with the intention of enslaving humanity, despite living with a slack-jawed roommate in a terrible apartment and fetching cookies for the old lady next door. There, he begins his campaign, only to fall for a free-spirited and kindhearted suffragette (Zoey Deutch) and get distracted from the mission. It’s a weird, ungainly little side quest that’s nonetheless funny, sweet, and unexpected, the type of thing the third act could use more of.

Even when “Minions & Monsters” is at its weakest, there is a sense of genuine creative glee within it that’s all too often missing from franchise films of its nature, a genuine appreciation for film and its history and its creative power to enchant and delight that bleeds through the screen. What sets the movie apart, though, is it isn’t the type of soppy “power of cinema” story that mourns classic cinema as a bygone relic of better days. In its closing moments, as James and his friends get to complete their film, “Minions & Monsters” almost treats classic cinema as a legacy that can be reincarnated and recreated in a new era. If the ones who have to do that necromancy are banana-loving yellow freaks? Well, then, Viva la Minions.

Grade: B

“Minions & Monsters” is in theaters now.

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