You know a film’s struggled a bit when the end credits are the best bit of it. Minions & Monsters is a case in point, a collection of individually brilliant scenes in search of a plot, exemplified by those end credits, which are the one-damn-thing situation distilled.
Does anyone not know who the Minions are? This is the third outing for the little yellow animated servants away from their master, despicable supervillain Gru, whose own Despicable Me franchise has racked up four iterations, all of them also featuring the Minions. So that’s seven movies in all. Remarkably, all of the Minion movies have been written by Brian Lynch, and Pierre Coffin has directed three of the four Despicables and two of the three standalone Minions, so if it’s consistency you’re after…
Housekeeping out of the way, let’s dig in to a movie that resists that sort of treatment. It is highly episodic, kicking off in ancient history where the Minions are, again, seeking an evil master to serve, fixing on a brutish cyclops, a cursed mummy, a vile pirate king, a wicked despot and a fiendish Chinese emperor as the story tracks these arch enablers of the reprehensible down through history’s timeline, a populist army ready to serve whichever baddie is the baddest.
Which is how they end up in Hollywood, ho ho, in the silent era, where two of the Minions, James and Henry, decide that they’d rather make art than war, and so a tussle for the Minion soul breaks out. As everything from Charlie Chaplin to Casablanca and Citizen Kane is referenced, it turns out that some Minions seem to have been pre-loaded with useful names, if Hollywood is the destination: step forward Federico, Quentin, Erich, Ridley and so on.
It’s all great: lively, funny and super-referential, especially once Minion James comes up with the idea to make a movie called Minions and Monsters. And there’s even a theme of sorts in the shape of the guys who want to break free of their own destiny versus the lumpen others, who just want to kick the ass of the weakest at the behest of the strongest. Modern politics, huh.
Famous voice names include Zoey Deutch and Jesse Eisenberg, with Christoph Waltz turning up to voice a stereotypical German tyrant director. George Lucas has his own very brief cameo. Allison Janney is the narrator, while South Park’s Trey Parker puts in a turn as Goomi, a monster conjured up using a book of spells the Minions picked up while serving as a wizard’s henchmen. Apart from Janney, you’d struggle to put a name to the voices, though when Janney informs us that there’s “truly nothing better” than watching a movie on a big screen in the dark in a theatre full of people, that’s clearly the voice of an industry in trouble speaking rather than her own.
There is a lot of yellow, and a lot of Minions and it gets quite hard to tell one from the other. Even James (one eye) and Henry (two eyes) – our goodies – and Dick (the soulless monomaniac baddie) get occasionally lost in the sea of undifferentiated yellow Minion-ness.
The film is at its best in its Hollywood spoof moments and you’ll probably wish there were more of them to distract from a plot that gets flabbier as things go along. I’d almost suggest skipping the movie and just watching the end credits, which are fast and furious and a reminder of how much energy the Minions used to have. Or watch the film in entertaining chunks, as if you were watching a Looney Tunes outing featuring Bugs or Daffy. As they used to say – that’s all, folks!
Minions and Monsters – Watch it/buy it at Amazon
I am an Amazon affiliate
© Steve Morrissey 2026
