The minions are like rogue planets lost in space, bereft of a star to orbit. So the minions retreat to an arctic cavern, where they build their own society in seclusion.īut something is still missing. Caveman, pharaoh, vampire, Napoleon-all are tried on for size as masters, but none quite fit. The minions graduate from fish groupies to dinosaur groupies, before taking an inevitable step backward with the arrival of human beings. A narrator (Geoffrey Rush) explains that while not all minions are created alike-some have one eye, some two some are taller, some rounder-“they all share the same goal: to serve the most despicable master they can find.”Ĭue history. But who’s that there, dangling off the tail fin of a particularly wicked-looking fish? Why it’s a minion, one of those little lemon Tic Tacs of servility who worked for the supervillain Gru in the prior films. But making films for a young audience isn’t – or at least shouldn’t be – the same thing as maths.Minions, the spinoff/prequel of Universal Pictures’ Despicable Me movies, begins, fittingly enough, at the very beginning: In a protean sea, single-celled creatures compete and evolve, predators and prey growing in tandem. On paper, Minions adds up: as, no doubt, will its box-office takings. But instead, it soon becomes one barely choreographed, weightless action sequence flailing into the next.
#Despicable me minions 2015 movie movie
Had Balda and Coffin drawn inspiration from silent comedy – as Aardman Animations did for their intricately funny Shaun the Sheep movie – you suspect the film might have been better equipped to sustain the energy of those giddy early minutes. In the same way, there’s no attempt to give the Minions material that might better play to their preverbal, indestructible strengths. Most of the film could be taking place anywhere, and the period detail doesn’t extend much further than hippies, teapots and songs by Donovan and The Kinks – real souvenir-shop stuff. The Sixties setting, for instance, seems to have been chosen largely so the plot can dovetail with what we should probably now call The Despicable Me Expanded Universe, rather than for its unique look or specific comic potential.
You sense a shuddering apprehension in every creative choice – as if one false move, or even an overly brazen one, would destabilise the formula. Super-villain Scarlett Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock) and the MinionsĪnd it’s here the film’s spark is snuffed out for good: the focus shifts to Scarlett’s convoluted plan to overthrow the Queen of England, and the film becomes a fourth-rate Despicable Me clone. (Jon Hamm gives what will surely be the most negligible voice performance of the year as Herb, her husband-slash-kit man.) Instead, three Minion emissaries, called Kevin, Bob and Stuart, make for a villain convention in Florida, where they throw in their lot with Scarlett Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock), a rising star on the bad-guy circuit. Then follows a string of miniature skits, in which the small yellow types serve various historical brutes, from Tyrannosaurus Rex to the pharaohs of ancient Egypt.įrustratingly, what seems like the set-up for an internship with Richard Nixon (the Minions bob into New York Harbor in 1968, under a grinning poster of the US president) comes to nothing. As they scramble up the food-chain – in the wakes of progressively bigger and nastier boss fish, naturally – they finally bob to the ocean’s surface and, like a self-inflating life-raft, the film suddenly plumps out into rubbery CGI. It opens with a hand-drawn prologue, in which we see the Minions evolving from a shoal of plankton-like parasites. The appearance of a Minions-only spin-off film in the gap between the second and impending third Despicable Mes, therefore, makes perfect business sense: in fact, Penguins of Madagascar pulled a similar stunt only last December, with mostly successful results.īut what’s surprising about Minions is that it squanders these yellow oddballs’ new-found freedom: in fact, it yokes them to a permanent supervillain gig almost as soon as it possibly can, as if directors Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin and screenwriter Brian Lynch were terrified of skittering too far off-piste.īefore it cops out, though, the film’s a delight. The Minions go to England in the Despicable Me spin-off
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