‘Minions,’ ‘Amy,’ ‘Strangerland’ and ‘Self/less’
Not every co-star is worth a whole movie, and the minions, as it turns out, weren’t. A spinoff of the “Despicable Me” movies, in which the little yellow fellows were the villain’s henchmen, “Minions” is a pointless, frenetic exercise with tired jokes and weak sequences piled one on top of the other, until feature length is finally reached and everybody can go home.
When you look at the ambition, imagination and emotional range of a Pixar effort like “Inside Out,” “Minions” looks like a visit to animation’s bad old days. Watching it is like watching the product of some hellish game of free association, in which various people came up with ideas and no one was allowed to say, “But wait, that’s lousy.” All art is, in a sense, a give and take between impulse and control, but “Minions” is all impulses, mostly bad ones.
It’s not funny. It’s more like a mess. At one point, one of the minions is crowned King of England (don’t ask) and must make a speech. He says his name, “King Bob!” and the crowd cheers. Then he starts talking, and the audience is confused because minions don’t speak English. After a few moments, sensing he is losing his audience, he concludes by saying, “King Bob!” again, and the audience cheers again. That’s supposed to be hilarious.
A moment later, “My Generation” is blaring over the sound track, for no reason at all, except that the movie happens to be set in London in 1968.
There are odd musical references throughout “Minions,” and the impression that comes through is that audiences are supposed to derive pleasure from them for no reason but that they’re unexpected. For example, the minions break into a gibberish version of “Make ’Em Laugh” from “Singin’ in the Rain.” The Boxtops song “The Letter” and the Kinks’ “You Really Got Me” underscore scenes which are animated slapstick and have nothing to do with the music.
A narrated sequence at the start tells us who the minions are — yellow creatures whose entire mission in life is to serve an evil master. The gimmick, a potentially funny one, is that they’re so incompetent that they inevitably end up undermining their masters by accident — such as waking up Dracula in the afternoon. Fine. Cute idea. But “Minions” is so poorly conceived that, despite that setup, nothing like that happens in the movie.
To talk about the story of “Minions” is to make the movie seem more linear than it is. Basically, it’s about three of these little creatures who go into the world, looking for someone evil to serve, and at a villains’ convention they meet Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock), who fancies herself the most evil woman in the world. She sends the minions out on a mission to steal the crown jewels from Queen Elizabeth II, and the adventures go on from there.
“Minions” has the same problem as “Despicable Me,” only worse. The protagonists are ciphers, and their goal is unworthy and of little interest. The bottom line is that the filmmakers are working with nothing here — no characters to speak of, no interpersonal relationships, no story with any suspense or capacity to engage, and no script with any humor or wit.