MOVIE REVIEW
“The Minions”
Grade: B-
Starring voices of Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm and Michael Keaton. Directed by Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda.
Rated PG for action and rude humor. Check listings for theaters. 1 hour, 31 minutes.
Bottom line: Squeaks and chuckles of Minions best things in movie
Sidekicks rarely shine when thrust into the spotlight, but what about a few hundred of them?
The Minions, having been the best part of the two previous “Despicable Me” movies, have swarmed the screen in “Minions.” As candidates for center stage, they are seemingly ill-suited. Slavishly — if rarely competently — devoted lackeys, they’re underlings by both definition and verticality.
They don’t speak intelligibly, which, to be fair, isn’t a bar all of Hollywood’s leading men reach. Instead, they talk in a bright babble that belies their fondness for colorful phonetics. “Banana” and “piñata” are their kind of words.
Their unsuitability for the lead role, or just about anything else, is much of the fun of “Minions,” a happy henchmen overload that largely succeeds in its simple mission: More Minions!
Directed by Pierre Coffin (who co-directed “Despicable Me” one and two and voices the Minions) and Kyle Balda, “Minions” begins in fine form. The little yellow ones are already humming the Universal theme as the film begins.
With Geoffrey Rush narrating, we get the history of the Minions, which stretches back across eons and begins with them — a curios early mammal — literally walking out of the sea.
But the evolution stops there. For thousands of years, we see, they’ve been letting down their evil masters, from a Tyrannosaurus Rex accidentally tipped into a volcano, to Dracula, whom they excitedly wake with a birthday cake and wide-open blinds.
The Minions have their own Ice Age, however, ending up leaderless in Antarctica. After a few hundred years, the joy of snow ball fights beginning to dim, three of them — Kevin, Bob and Stuart — set out on a quest to find a new supervillain to idolize.
Soon, they’re on their way to Villain-Con, a riff on Comic-Con only a convention celebrating the likes of Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock), an evil world-conqueror in a beehive. The trio inadvertently wins a job in Overkill’s entourage, and they’re soon enmeshed in her plan to take the British throne, along with Overkill’s inventor, Herb (Jon Hamm).
There are, it should be noted, more ambitious seats of power to set one’s diabolical sights on. But this is 1960s Swinging London, a colorful if over-familiar backdrop, and the goggle-wearing Minions could just as well be chipper Mods.
The irreverent slapstick unfortunately gives way to the kind of action set pieces that have now even corrupted children’s movies. The bombast, though never serious, is still loud enough to, for too long, drown out the best thing the movie has going for it: the chuckles and squeaks of the Minions.
