About halfway through Pierre Coffin’s “Minions & Monsters,” we see an old-timey news reel. The film is set in the 1920s, and the news reel tells us a few important things about the time we find ourselves in: the economy is thriving, everyone is happier than ever, and the minions are the biggest draws the box office has ever seen.
Most of this does not apply to the world we actually live in. But the minions are a huge financial success. Combined with “Despicable Me,” the “Minions” franchise has made about $5.6 billion globally – and that doesn’t include the hundreds of millions in merchandise they’ve sold.
“Minions & Monsters” feels like the type of movie you only get to make when you have those kinds of numbers to back you up. Coffin (who also voices the minions, crucially) has directed multiple installments of “Minions” and “Despicable Me.” I’m not the first person to point this out, and I have no evidence to say that it’s true, but the premise of “Minions & Monsters” – in which the minions become silent film stars and then try to make a monster movie of their own – feels like Coffin and screenwriter Brian Lynch (also no stranger to the “Minions” franchise) pointing to the piles of money these little yellow weirdos have made over the years and saying: “Will you let us make our homage to the magic of Hollywood if we put the minions in it? Please?”
The results may vary, depending on who you are. I took my five-year-old nephews and their mom with me to my press screening. I found the movie history bits charming, but my eyes glazed over when the final act descended into animated monster madness. My nephews laughed at anything silly the minions said (especially if it related to bodily functions), but also seemed a little disinterested in the giant monster fight at the film’s end. And my sister (not a movie buff, or a five-year-old boy) thought the whole thing was bad.
So it seems the real target audience for this one is “cinephiles with kids.” And, for the most part, “Minions & Monsters” does a pretty good job at combining the respective humors of both of those demographics. For example, I don’t know any little kid who has seen Charlie Chaplin’s classic “Modern Times,” but I do know a lot of little kids who will laugh at the minions getting stuck inside a factory machine alongside a small, mustachioed man.
This power of combination is best emphasized in a stretch that most closely resembles “Singin’ in the Rain” where “talkies” suddenly come into the picture – and all the minions, who famously cannot speak English, are Lina Lamont. My nephews’ favorite joke in the whole movie was when a minion – bedridden, holding a snow globe, and looking on the verge of saying something profound – looked into the camera and said: “Poop.” What they didn’t know was that the entire bit was a riff on the opening of “Citizen Kane.” But it worked for them on one level, and for me on another. Maybe theirs wasn’t the most sophisticated level, but who am I to judge?
The movie bits are charming, but Coffin and Lynch then have the very real problem of having to put an actual plot onscreen to accompany those bits. Around the time sound movies come into play, the minions get kicked out of their studio contract and attempt to summon monsters from a spellbook so they can make a monster movie on their own. This is about the time one of my nephews leaned over and asked me when the movie would be over, and also when “Minions & Monsters” delves into something wholly less enjoyable and more rote. There’s a romantic subplot that riffs on the robot from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” (funny, but less successful than the poop/”Citizen Kane” joke at bridging the gap between generations), but for the most part, the end of the film rests on the plot mechanics of monsters fighting bigger monsters – old time-y movie jokes left to the wayside.
