'Minions' Review: I Was Not Curious (Yellow)

I am not an eight-year-old, as you can probably tell from my impressive vocabulary and also some other stuff too I guess, so I’m probably no longer in the target demographic for a movie about Minions. The new film about these adorable yellow monsters from Despicable Me and Despicable Me 2 finally answers the questions I basically forgot to ask in the first place, like “What are those little Twinkie people,” and “Where did their overalls come from?”

Overall, they came from a long and contrived series of shenanigans, filled with elaborate in-jokes about 1960s British culture that kids are obviously going to love. After all, what eight-year-old child couldn’t easily recognize an Abbey Road reference just from looking at John, Paul, George and Ringo’s feet? Minions is so heavy with 50-year-old pop culture references that it only barely comes together, but come together it does, over my objections, mostly just “because.”

After an early prologue establishing that Minions evolved since the age of the dinosaurs to serve the most despicable master they can find (for reasons that serve the continuity of Despicable Me but make absolutely no sense on their own), the majority of Minions takes place in the 1960s, when three of these banana creatures – Kevin, Stuart and Bob – leave their tribe to find a new evil genius to love. Their previous masters include Napoleon Bonaparte and Dracula, and the film finds an excuse as quickly as possible to explain why they weren’t serving Hitler in World War II.

So Kevin, Stuart and Bob travel to a supervillain conference in Florida where they get jobs working for Scarlet Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock), the world’s first female supervillain, who assigns them the job of stealing the Crown Jewels. They bungle the job but accidentally wind up ruling the country, because of course they do. How could they not?

The whole movie plays more like a distraction than an actual film. Where the first two Despicable Me’s had a heart, Minions has only an adrenal gland. It just goes and goes and goes until it suddenly decides, rather arbitrarily, to explain how the Minions finally wound up with the lovable mad scientist Gru, and then it stops. Those last few seconds feel like a genuine extension of the Despicable Me franchise. The thousands of seconds that precede it feel like leftover material from a Saturday morning spin-off that meant nothing and went nowhere.

Fortunately, directors Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda inject Minions with rambunctious energy that keeps the jokes flying fast enough that you might not notice that a lot of them aren’t funny, and that none of it makes a lot sense, even on the film’s own, decidedly strange merits. After all, the central conceit of Minions is that there is a species of people on Earth who are defined by a particular skin color, funny accents, and the scientific fact that they are only good for serving other people.

“Funny” doesn’t seem to be the right word for that. Let’s just go with “iffy.”