The Minions cannot be stopped. Civilisations crumble, polar ice retreats, governments rise and fall, yet these beady-eyed, gibberish-muttering creatures carry on regardless. Minions & Monsters, the seventh instalment of the Cinematic Gruniverse, arrives as confirmation that the franchise is very much alive, entirely unstoppable, and apparently quite content to outlast us all.
Setting Sail for a New Master
Following the underwhelming Despicable Me 4 of 2024, this latest chapter leaves Gru behind entirely and focuses squarely on the Minions themselves. A particular tribe of these diminutive yellow beings takes to the open ocean, driven by that ancient, unbreakable compulsion to find a villainous master to serve. Their voyage is eventful: encounters with the tyrants of revolutionary France and a terrifying cyclops await them along the way. That cyclops confrontation, incidentally, may be the only point of comparison between Minions & Monsters and Christopher Nolan's The Odyssey.
James, Henry, and the Dream of Storytelling
With Bob sitting this adventure out, the lead roles fall to two new Minion characters: James and Henry. While the rest of their species remains fixated solely on finding evil to serve, these two carry a different kind of ambition entirely. They want to share their stories with the world. This premise gives the film an unexpected emotional thread running beneath all the chaos and slapstick. Buried inside all the usual nonsense is a surprisingly earnest celebration of the art of storytelling. As in all previous entries, co-director Pierre provides the voices for every Minion on screen.
The journey eventually deposits James, Henry, and their companions in 1920s America, right on the set of a Western film shoot. From there, through a chain of accidents and spectacular misadventures, they stumble their way into becoming the most talked-about new faces in Hollywood.
A Surprise Love Letter to Classic Cinema
This is, against all odds, the most cinephile-friendly film the Minions franchise has ever produced. It is filled with fond, knowing nods to great films of the past, from Charlie Chaplin's Modern Times to Harold Lloyd's Safety Last. These references will almost certainly sail over the heads of the children in the audience, but for parents who know their film history, they deliver genuine pleasure. Most remarkable of all is a voice cameo from George Lucas, somehow persuaded out of retirement to take on a small but very funny role. The film also appears to contain what may be the first Citizen Kane-based fart joke in cinema history.
Joyfully, Defiantly Silly
For all its cinematic ambitions and storytelling aspirations, this remains, at heart, a very silly film. The tone throughout is gleefully juvenile, unapologetically committed to chaos, slapstick, and cheerful stupidity. There is no real attempt to build the kind of emotional depth that a Pixar film would reach for. At its core, it is a fresh string of situations engineered to let small yellow creatures cause maximum disruption. The world keeps turning. The Minions keep running. And audiences, for better or worse, keep watching.
