By Elliot Kaufman
The next Minions movie keeps things simple: send the little yellow agents of chaos to Hollywood, let them break everything in sight, and call it a day. The good news is it mostly works. The bad news is half the movie its title promises barely leaves a mark.
There are times when a movie review needs context, nuance, maybe even a little soul-searching. This is not one of those times.
Minions & Monsters is exactly what it looks like: the newest Minions movie, now with a Hollywood backdrop and a monster angle bolted onto it. That simplicity is not necessarily a crime. In fact, one of the better things I can say about the movie is that it knows not to overstay its welcome. It gets in, does its bit, and gets out in about 90 minutes. For animated family movies with a paper-thin premise, that should honestly be the law.
The setup is easy enough to explain. The Minions land in Hollywood, become a big deal, and a couple of them decide they want to make their own monster movie. Naturally, the monsters stop being movie props and start becoming an actual problem. Then it turns into a save-Hollywood story, because Hollywood sure as hell is not going to save itself.
That’s the movie. If you’ve seen the trailer, you’ve basically seen the blueprint. Maybe too much of the blueprint.
I’ve had a weird relationship with the Minions over the years. At first they annoyed me on sight. Then at some point, against my will, I kind of got it. These movies are not trying to be Pixar at its most emotionally devastating. They are not trying to teach kids a lesson about grief, identity, or the healing power of vulnerability. The Minions are just chaos. They’re slapstick little freaks. They’re basically Jackass for children, filtered through a global merchandising empire.
And honestly? There is a place for that.
When Minions & Monsters is just letting that energy loose, it can be pretty funny. The movie moves fast, throws out sight gags at a decent clip, and keeps the tone light enough that even when a joke doesn’t land, another one is usually right behind it. There are also a bunch of old-Hollywood references sprinkled throughout, and those work better than I expected. If you’re a grown adult sitting there without kids, those nods are the movie quietly tossing you a bone. Your kids won’t care, but you might.
There’s something that still works about animated movies taking swings at Hollywood nonsense. Animaniacs did it. Looney Tunes did it. The entertainment industry is a naturally funny target, especially when you treat it like a ridiculous machine powered by vanity, panic, and people in expensive shoes pretending they know what audiences want. Putting Minions in that world makes sense. In fact, the more I watched it, the more I thought the movie should have committed even harder to that premise.
Because here’s the real problem: the Hollywood stuff is more memorable than the monster stuff.
That’s not ideal when your movie is called Minions & Monsters.
The monsters, outside of one or two visual ideas, are mostly a blur. There’s a big eyeball blob. There’s the expected assortment of creatures that feel like they were designed by a committee instructed to make them “fun spooky” and then sent home early. If you asked me to draw or even clearly describe most of them a day later, I’d be in trouble. They’re generic in a way the movie can’t afford. The title is making a promise, and the movie only really cashes in on the Minions half of it.
There is one fun wrinkle involving a creature that looks like it might become some giant Lovecraftian nightmare and instead turns out to be a cute little monster voiced by Trey Parker. That bit works. It helps that Parker sounds like he wandered in from a South Park recording session and nobody told him to change a thing. It gives the character an actual personality, which is more than I can say for most of the other creatures in the movie.
That “personality deficit” spills into the plot, too. There are characters and arcs here that feel less like real story choices and more like emergency script repairs. You can practically see the writers hitting a wall and asking, “How do we get out of this?” The answer, more than once, seems to be introducing a convenient character or story beat that can save the day and pad the runtime at the same time.
That doesn’t ruin the movie, but you feel it. The first half has a little spark. The second half starts looking stitched together.
And yet, I can’t say I had a bad time.
That’s the annoying thing about these movies. Even when they’re slight, even when they’re running on franchise fumes, they usually understand rhythm well enough to stay watchable. I had a decent enough time with it, and more importantly, kids probably will too. There were even a couple darker jokes in here than I expected. No blood, obviously, but there are moments where the movie gets away with more than you’d think. One scene absolutely counts as a decapitation, and I respect the nerve.
There’s also something funny about hearing a cast like this and realizing some of these people may have just earned the easiest paycheck of their lives. Christoph Waltz is in this movie. I am not fully convinced Christoph Waltz knows he’s in this movie.
As a family option, it works. If you’ve got kids, they’ll probably have a good time, and you likely won’t hate yourself sitting through it. That’s a better endorsement than it sounds like. Family movies don’t always clear that bar. This one does.
If you don’t have kids, that calculation changes a little. You may find yourself asking the same question I did during a few stretches: why exactly am I here? If the answer is “because I like animation” or “because I’m weirdly tolerant of Minion chaos,” you’ll be fine. If the answer is “I’m hoping this reinvents the franchise,” it does not. Not even close.
In the end, Minions & Monsters is a perfectly serviceable piece of studio entertainment. It’s fast, occasionally funny, and smart enough not to drag itself to two hours. The Hollywood angle gives it more juice than the monster angle does, which is both the movie’s biggest strength and its weirdest own goal.
Honestly, they should have just called it The Minions Do Hollywood. That’s the movie I actually watched.
And that movie? It’s fine. Not special. Not embarrassing. Just fine, with a few good laughs and a short enough runtime to keep me from getting hostile.
If you’ve seen Minions & Monsters, let me know what you thought. If your kids loved it, I get it. If you were left wondering why the monsters were such an afterthought, I get that too.
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