minions: the rise of gru

DIRECTOR Kyle Balda STARRING (voices) Steve Carell, Russell Brand, Julie Andrews, Taraji P. Henson, Jean-Claude Van Damme ETA 3 July 2020 2 July 2021 When the Minions were first being designed to appear in 2010’s Despicable Me, they were envisaged as “big, strong, muscular”. So said co-director Pierre Coffin, who admits the henchmen were reimagined as yellow Tic Tacs wearing goggles and overalls because it was cheaper.

“Their popularity was never anticipated on this level,” says Kyle Balda, who co-directed 2015 spinoff movie Minions and now returns with Minions: The Rise

Of Gru. “They were very relatable, childlike.”

Relatable to the tune of $1.2bn at the box office for the 2015 movie, and so now we have Minions: The Rise Of Gru, a sequel to a spinoff that acts as an origin story for Steve Carell’s big-hearted supervillain. In it, we find Felonius Gru growing up in the suburbs in the 1970s, determined to join supervillain group Vicious 6.

Carell is back as Gru, and members of the Vicious 6 are voiced by the likes of Dolph Lundgren, Danny Trejo, Taraji P. Henson and Jean-Claude Van Damme, who plays Jean Clawed, a villain with a giant lobster claw for an arm. The film is currently unfinished, with Paris-based animation production company Illumination Mac Guff temporarily closed due to the Covid-19 pandemic.

GO BIG SCREEN A small screen just can’t handle this amount of action and this number of Minions.

To Gru’s disappointment, the people at the door were not from the People’s Postcode Lottery.