Minions & Monsters review – a smart premise descends into more of the same

The hugely successful, gibberish-heavy franchise travels back to old Hollywood for an adventure that swaps out nifty ideas for repetitive chaos

The yellow, cylindrical, overall-clad creatures known as the Minions first appeared as loyal henchmen to Steve Carell’s villainous Gru in Illumination’s Despicable Me, which chronicled Gru’s attempt to steal the moon with the help of three orphaned girls. Along the way, Gru learned affection, the girls grew up, and the Minions – well, the Minions always stay the same. They are cute, defenseless and incompetent. They speak in “Minionese”, a gibberish mishmash of languages endlessly memed by a generation with a nearly dadaist devotion to babble. Despicable Me sequels have, in the past 16 years, coalesced into the highest-grossing animated franchise of all time, in part because of the Minions’ viral success.

With Minions & Monsters, the seventh entry in the franchise and third movie in the Minion-centered spin-off series, returning director Pierre Coffin retreads much of the territory covered by 2015’s Minions. Like that movie, Minions & Monsters starts with a peripatetic tribe of Minions in search of their next despicable boss. But instead of winding up exiled in an ice cave, this time the Minions find themselves riding a train off the rails and into the Bright Brothers’ studio lot in late 1920s Los Angeles, at the height of Hollywood’s silent era.
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