Minions: The Rise Of Gru squashes and stretches the supervillain sidekicks’ mythology
Kevin, Stuart, and Bob once again eclipse their scheming boss while embarking on new Looney Tunes-style hijinks
Film Reviews GRU
Children and stoners rejoice: the Minions are back. Minions: The Rise Of Gru uses the story of Gru’s budding super-villainy as a conveyance for more bumbling, uniquely addictive hijinks from the Three Stooges/Marx Brothers/Looney Tunes-inspired gibberish spouters, and the ride is considerably more pleasant than you might expect. Nobody is going to mistake these yellow, overalls-clad Styrofoam peanuts for leading men of substance, but director Kyle Balda (Despicable Me 3) redeems the best part of the franchise he helped create by wisely giving Gru—and any slightly more serious storytelling—a back seat to the most fun you’ll see this side of Wile E. Coyote’s Acme catalog.
Back in the 1970s, Gru (Steve Carell) was still in short pants when he hatched ambitions to be a super villain. After discovering that evil team the Vicious 6 is looking for a new member following the demise of founder (and Gru’s idol) Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin), Gru applies for the position. But the Vicious 6 members refuse to take the kid seriously, even though he successfully steals the amulet they intended to use to conquer the world. In Gru’s ensuing escape, he passes off the amulet for safekeeping to Otto (Pierre Coffin), a well-meaning but perhaps unsurprisingly unreliable Minion who, predictably, loses it.
While Gru figures out another way to appease the Vicious 6—in the process, crossing paths with a vengeful, very-not-dead Wild Knuckles, who kidnaps Gru to reclaim the amulet for himself—the Minions fly into action to locate and recapture the prized item. During their journey, they encounter a friendly biker (RZA) and a reluctant martial arts instructor (Michelle Yeoh) who prepare them, sometimes inadvertently, first to rescue Gru and then to fight back against the Vicious 6.
It’s easy to see what makes the Minions so appealing to kids—they’re about the same size, they’re endlessly cheerful, they speak in unintelligible nonsense, and they show their butts, a lot. It’s also understandable why they can’t quite anchor a film all by themselves, and it’s not just because they can recruit Carell, or Sandra Bullock in Minions, or heavy hitters like Arkin, Henson, Yeoh and RZA to pinch-hit as their human counterparts. Their sweet stupidity possesses a kind of anachronistic, purely physical charm that Hollywood mostly left behind when it started making talkies. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean anyone actually cares about those human characters, possibly outside of Gru, whose fanboy adulation for Wild Knuckles is navigated so well here that it never jeopardizes his fiendish (future) ambitions.
Balda and co-screenwriters Matthew Fogel and Brian Lynch are tasked with threading a very thin needle between slapstick set pieces, with just enough plot to both tug gently at the audience’s heartstrings and for these delightful little dumb-dumbs to get themselves into trouble. They manage to pull it off, although introducing Otto—a newer Minion, even dumber than Kevin, Stuart, or Bob—doesn’t quite prove to be the Elmo-to-Grover-like triumph one imagines they had hoped for. Then again, Otto trades the amulet for a pet rock he falls in love with, so perhaps it’s unfair not to grade these films’ creative choices on at least a slight curve.
Other than RZA as the especially happy-go-lucky biker who helps Otto on his quest for the amulet, the film’s celebrity voice cast members deliver their dialogue with uninspiring proficiency, although I’d pay good money to watch live video of Arkin cantankerously reading lines in the booth and wondering what he’d signed up for. Coffin once again steals the show as the voice of all of the Minions, sputtering and giggling as they squash, stretch, and fart (of course) in response to the stimulus around them.
The 1970s setting gives the filmmakers an opportunity to recruit modern artists to record covers of classics like “Funkytown” (St. Vincent) and “Hollywood Swinging” (Brockhampton), bridging the gap between past and present, adult and child. But with five films, shorts, a television special, and a theme park ride, it’s clear that the Minions aren’t going anywhere any time soon, no matter whose coattails they’re supposed to be riding. Ultimately, The Rise Of Gru exerts a negligible impact on the Minions’ canonical journey. If nothing else, the film serves as a reminder of the characters’ cartoonish charms, both literally and thematically, and their transcendent appeal.
33 Comments
I swear if I see any more of these annoying yellow fucks I’m going to kill myself or them
If you see one it’s to late. It means there are like a thousand living in you walls.
I know what you mean Popsicle just gave us a shit load of boxes of their Minon Popsicles st work. Don’t they know how much a pain in the neck it is to backstock that crap in the walk in freezer.
Well, since they don’t actually exist, we can all celebrate the alternative!
Just embrace it. They’re nice
Good news! The SPR3’s mythology has been squashed and stretched by the release of a NEW music video this morning!!!
They gave Eminem a lot of shit for allowing Lose Yourself in the trailer. I thought that was kinda of unfair… until I saw the trailer. It’s one of the worst movie trailers I’ve ever seen.
I saw this trailer over the weekend, and it validates every bad thing I’ve ever said about Eminem, related or not. I loved it.
very useful information.
Is it bad that I would rather have a movie of Sandra Bullock’s character from the first Minions movie? Scarlet Overkill was a lot more entertaining than Gru. The whole story was her being nice to the Minions and then they just totally ruin her life’s ambition by accident eventually leading to Kid Gru winning everything even though he was only in the last 1-2 minutes of the film. Freaking incompetent yet super-lucky tic-tac monsters ruin lives unless you turn out to be Uncle Fester the kid-friendly Supervillain.
Gru is amusing as the straight man in his own story. I know he’s supposed to be very good at his job but the fact that the best he can do for henchmen is the Minions says he may not be as competent as we’re led to believe.I do think turning the Minions into their own race of villain enablers was odd, since the implication in the first movie was they were something that Gru and Dr. Nefario created (explaining the whole crowd of them being somewhat off).
I think it came from them wanting to cash in on the marketability of the minions but not knowing if Steve Carrell would keep signing on. Having their entire purpose in life be to help villains but making them so inept that they are only effective when they aren’t trying to be helpful was also kind of weird.
Its been fun watching both of my daughter’s trajectory of Minions fandom. Despicable Me came out when they were ages 3 and 1. Through the years, they just loved the Minions. Now they are 15 and 12 and use the Minions as a means of making fun of someone. If they want to say someone is awful, they say they probably love the Minions. Its fascinating to me seeing the 180 they did in their lives
Grade B, for “Ba-na-na”(They love Banana, that’s all I know about the Minions. Oh, and that the first Minions movie opened with a bit about how the Minions exiled themselves for the first half of the 20th century, to write around why they didn’t help the Third Reich commit genocide.)
I know they also have special menu items at participating IHoPs
Buttermilk pancakes filled with fresh banana slices and topped with creamy banana pudding, more banana slices, NILLA® wafer cookie pieces, whipped topping and Minion sprinkles.dear god
Minion sprinkles get you pregnant, men or women. Be careful!
Too much banana fuck that ihop
Never saw a single Dispicable Me movie but I love the Boomer memes. Nothing like seeing one of those yellow homunculi with text talking about how back in your day we hit our childrn and society was better for it or some such bullshit. Even funnier if said boomer also laments about how their adult children want nothing to do with them anymore.
You act like kids are the target audience, when in fact it’s middle aged wine moms using the tic-tac monsters as a kind of reflexive anti-humour.
don’t forget about the deeply irony-poisoned! if i was in my 20s i’d absolutely be squadding up with my degenerate friends for this.
That’s what Shrek is for
coincidentally that new puss in boots does look kind of interesting.
Thinking twice about my comment to someone else saying they’re good
I don’t think it’s possible to make a good Looney Tunes movie anymore; the characters are both too famous to take a back seat, and not popular enough to hold a movie on their own without basketball superstars playing themselves. As a replacement in the so-simple-a-child-can-get-it humor category, Minions is nowhere near as groundbreaking but it’s fine.
But is it woke enough to compete with light year?
I miss when voice acting was more of a specialty. People like Frank Welker and Peter Cullen are heroes of mine. And too often celebrity casting just doesn’t work that well.
It still is in most animated TV shows and video games. It’s just movies that have almost exclusively gone the “stunt cast a bunch of big names” route over the last few decades.
you say that as if we don’t still have the same two dozen voice actors voicing absolutely everything that a celeb doesn’t get
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OMG – fuck Minions and the stupid assholes who like it. I would rather eat shit than watch it.
Peak era AVC would never have hired a critic who wanted anything to do with such a soulless bit of corporate product.
Hot take: These movies are fine and are a hell of a lot better — i.e. actually watchable — than most kids’ movies. I would rather watch Minions XII than see 30 seconds of The Croods or Ice Age 4 again, for instance.
The “better” kids’ movies you remember growing up sucked, but you were a kid, so you had terrible taste and didn’t realize your parents wanted to die sitting next to you in the theater watching that hot garbage you begged to see.