Minions & Monsters Review: Plenty of Jokes, Not Quite a Story

Official promotional image for Minions & Monsters. Used for review and commentary.

I saw Minions & Monsters as part of my youngest son's birthday celebration. He is a fairly rabid fan of both Despicable Me and the Minions films, so this was not a particularly difficult audience to win over. And the movie succeeded: he enjoyed it, I laughed quite a few times, and its excursion through early Hollywood contains some genuinely clever ideas. What surprised me was how little of the film remained once we left the cinema.

A great deal happens in Minions & Monsters. Very little of it seems to matter. The film's smartest idea — placing the Minions in the silent-film era — also exposes the central problem with building an entire feature around them. They are excellent engines for physical comedy precisely because they never really change. Over a few minutes that is a strength. Over ninety, it becomes considerably harder to turn chaos into a story.

The Minions Were Made for Silent Movies

The basic premise is unusually well suited to them. Minions & Monsters follows another tribe of Minions who eventually reach 1920s Hollywood, crash a film set and accidentally become movie stars. James and Henry, two Minions fascinated by filmmaking, later set out to make a monster movie of their own, with predictably disastrous consequences.

The early Hollywood material is where the film is most interesting. There are affectionate references to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton and the other great physical comedians of the silent era. Chaplin's journey through the machinery in Modern Times is recreated in Minion form. So is one of Keaton's most famous stunts from Steamboat Bill, Jr., in which the front of a house collapses around him and he survives because an open window lands exactly where he is standing.

These references work because they are more than Easter eggs for parents sitting beside their children. The Minions themselves belong to much the same comic tradition. Their dialogue has always been largely irrelevant. We understand them through movement, expression, misunderstanding and elaborate physical disaster. Give a Minion a simple task and a complicated machine and you can be reasonably confident that something will explode. Putting them into silent Hollywood feels less like parody than a homecoming.

The film then finds an even better joke when sound arrives. As silent performers, nobody cares that the Minions cannot speak intelligibly. Once Hollywood wants dialogue, their careers suddenly become much more difficult. Famous scenes and lines are handed to performers whose language consists largely of cheerful semi-nonsense, with predictable results.

It is funny, but it is also one of those rare occasions when a franchise joke grows naturally out of what the characters actually are. The Minions flourish under one technological regime and become useless almost overnight when the rules change. For a while, the film seems close to developing that joke into something larger: creatures who have accidentally found the one moment in history perfectly adapted to their talents now have to find another way to belong.

Then another idea arrives.

Activity Is Not Momentum

There is filmmaking, monsters, magic, Hollywood satire, aliens, escalating destruction and a steadily growing collection of complications. Many of these produce good individual jokes. Collectively, however, the movie increasingly feels like a series of comic sketches that happen to occupy the same running time.

This is where the difference between the early Despicable Me films and the Minions spin-offs becomes more obvious. The first Despicable Me had a very conventional emotional structure, but that structure worked. Gru begins the film obsessed with proving himself as a supervillain. The three girls initially matter because they can help him accomplish his plan. Gradually, those priorities reverse, until the criminal ambition that defined his life becomes less important than people he originally intended to use.

The comedy happens around that transformation. Gru wants something, makes choices, suffers consequences and eventually wants something different. The Minions can remain ridiculous because somebody else carries the dramatic weight.

The Minions themselves are designed to reset. One can be flattened, exploded, swallowed or launched into the air, and moments later everything is effectively fine. They rarely learn from disasters because learning would interfere with the mechanism that makes them funny. The next complicated machine still needs to be approached with exactly the same reckless confidence as the previous one.

Reset itself is not the problem. In my review of The Henry Stickmin Collection, repeated failure and instant retry are precisely what give the comedy its shape: choose, fail, laugh, try again. There the reset is the structure. In a feature film, the same elasticity becomes a weakness when nothing else carries consequences forward.

That is why Minions & Monsters maintains so much activity. If the protagonists cannot generate much change themselves, something new can always arrive: another character, another setting, another reference, another threat. The film is rarely boring because it is almost never still. Yet activity is not the same thing as momentum.

Narrative momentum comes from one event altering what becomes possible next. A decision creates a consequence; the consequence forces another decision. Even very silly stories benefit from that chain. By contrast, parts of Minions & Monsters feel as though individual sequences could be moved around without fundamentally changing the experience.

Some of this looseness may be deliberate. The movie often behaves more like a comic revue of Hollywood history than a conventional adventure, and viewed purely in those terms it contains plenty to enjoy. The difficulty is that it eventually introduces villains, monsters, danger and a large-scale climax that ask us to experience it as a story as well. It wants both the freedom of a sketch show and the stakes of an adventure without always building the structure that connects them.

Chaos Still Needs Construction

This is particularly noticeable because Minions & Monsters clearly loves silent comedy. The collapsing house from Buster Keaton is a useful example. The image itself is spectacular, but what makes the gag work is not randomness. Keaton stands in exactly the right place; the facade falls in exactly the right way. A long chain of physical circumstances converges on a single impossible-looking payoff. The scene feels chaotic, but the construction beneath it is extraordinarily precise.

The same is true of Chaplin being pulled into the machinery of Modern Times. The comedy escalates through cause and effect, with each mechanical complication producing the next one. The Minions inherit the visual vocabulary of that tradition beautifully: machinery, accidents and bodies thrown around by systems they barely understand. What Minions & Monsters borrows less consistently is the underlying construction. It understands the images of silent comedy better than it understands the mechanics that make those images accumulate into something larger.

That helps explain why the film is entertaining while you are watching it yet strangely insubstantial afterwards. A good joke needs perhaps thirty seconds of setup and payoff. A story creates expectations over a much longer period and eventually does something with them. Minions & Monsters remains extremely competent at the first task while becoming increasingly indifferent to the second.

The late metafictional turn makes the problem more visible. Without going into all the details of the ending, the film eventually reveals another layer of filmmaking around events we have been watching. Given that this is a movie about Hollywood and moviemaking, the idea is not arbitrary; it is considerably more defensible than simply announcing that everything was a dream. But it produces some of the same effect.

Used well, a reveal that events were imagined, performed or filmed can force us to reinterpret what came before. Used less successfully, it weakens the need for consequences because the story has quietly changed what counts as reality. That is especially risky in a Minions film, where consequences are already fragile. Nobody seriously worries that a Minion flattened by a large object will remain flattened. The comedy depends on a certain indestructibility. If the larger story also becomes provisional, there is even less reason to care how its pieces fit together.

This may sound like an unreasonable amount of concern about narrative ontology in a movie featuring small yellow creatures speaking Minionese and accidentally unleashing monsters. But absurd comedy still benefits from rules. Keaton's collapsing house works because, within the scene, the danger is real and the geometry has to be exact. Remove that precision and what looked like chaos becomes merely random.

Still Funny, but Increasingly Weightless

None of this means Minions & Monsters is a bad children's film. My son had a very good time, which is not a minor consideration when judging a movie made primarily for children. I laughed repeatedly myself, and the early Hollywood material is clever enough that adults with some knowledge of film history may get more from parts of the film than the children beside them.

Nor have the Minions stopped being funny. Their basic comic design remains remarkably durable. They are simple, immediately readable characters built for physical comedy, and after well over a decade they can still make a complicated machine and a badly understood instruction entertaining.

The original Despicable Me films simply understood that this was not enough by itself. The Minions could provide chaos because Gru supplied direction. His decisions gave the accidents somewhere to go.

Minions & Monsters accidentally demonstrates the same lesson through its fascination with silent cinema. Chaplin and Keaton could make chaos look effortless because beneath the chaos was construction. The Minions still have the chaos. What they increasingly lack is something for it to build towards.

The harder task has never been making us laugh when the machine explodes. It is making us care what happens afterwards. The earlier Despicable Me films had an answer to that question. Minions & Monsters mostly responds by bringing in another machine.