TAT WOLFEN
THE OPENING sequences of this frantic caper are its finest moments: the banana-craving Minions are placed in historical context, dating right back to that primordial soup; that sludge of bacteria and other interesting goodies to which all creatures crawling on the face of the Earth can trace their ancestry.
We learn that the Minions, as a race, have always gravitated towards evil, tyrannical and/or autocratic leaders (a perfect fit for Zimbabwe or South Africa!).
Their leaders, however, have a habit of being exterminated by other, greater evils, and the Minions end up in an existential wilderness; purposeless and depressed. This, then, is the scriptwriters’ device for explaining how these critters came to work in a world of crookedness, and ultimately, for Despicable Me’s Gru. So it’s a prequel, okay?
In order to simplify the story (and, undoubtedly, save on having to animate hundreds of individual Minions), the writers have three Minions leave the dejected tribe in order to go out into the world – pioneers in search of a new overlord. The Minions upon whose shoulders the hope of a nation rests, are Kevin, the tallest of the trio and probably the smartest; Stuart, a one-eyed guitar-player; and Bob, the baby of team who’s always lugging his wee teddy with him.
Bob, shown in the picture above, is ridiculously, outrageously, heart- meltingly cute.
For me, the prologue still doesn’t explain how this dear and harmless race of one-or-two-eyed yellow-folk end up working for bad guys.
It’s one thing to be happy to toil under a tyrant, and quite another to assist someone who does horrid things to other people.
I believe that responsible parents will have to do some explaining to small kids, as to why the Minions gleefully assist crooks in a bank robbery, for example. That moral grievance aside: After a brief ex- posure to the above-mentioned career path, they end up at a crime expo (yup; everyone’s having career expos these days!). This is where they win the opportunity of a lifetime (for criminals, that is) of working for the glamorously sinister Scarlett Overkill, voiced by Sandra Bullock. Her plan is to steal Queen Elizabeth II’s crown. This is all happening circa the late 1960s, I should mention, which gives the film-makers the opportunity to assemble a smashing soundtrack.
The story veers off in a number