Minions & Monsters is the best movie Illumination has made, right up until the monsters arrive

BCN Score: 76/100

The most surprising thing about Minions & Monsters is that Pierre Coffin made a real movie about silent film out of a mascot property, and that it works. The second most surprising thing is that he then hands the last act over to a giant squid.

Coffin, who directs and voices every Minion in the picture, sets this one before Minions (2015), in an Old Hollywood that runs on sawdust and cheap trickery. Three of the little guys, James, Henry and Ed, wander onto a train robbery in the desert and start chasing the robber, hoping to sign on as his henchmen. The robbery is a movie shoot. The director is furious. The studio executives watching from a canvas chair are delighted, and the Minions become silent stars.

That is a better idea than a Despicable Me prequel has any business having, and the film knows it. The silent stretch is where Coffin is loosest: pratfalls staged in long takes, an entire industry built on people falling over on purpose, and a physical comedy language that these characters are actually built for. Minionese is a silent-comedy dialect anyway. Putting it in 1920s Hollywood is the first time in seven films that the joke has a reason to exist.

Then sound arrives, and the Minions cannot be understood by a microphone. They get fired. That is a genuinely good gag and a genuinely mean one, and the movie earns the small ache underneath it.

Where it goes soft

Mild spoilers for the second act follow. Skip to "The numbers" if you want the film cold.

James, the one who draws, decides to make his own picture. It is a monster movie. Ed, having pocketed a warlock's spellbook earlier, decides the cheapest way to get a monster is to summon one.

That is the hinge, and it is where Minions & Monsters stops being about anything. The kaiju third act is loud and expensive and looks like the last four Illumination movies. Every joke that landed when it was three idiots and a camera crew gets restaged with a rubbery CG creature in the frame, and the creature is the least interesting thing in any shot it occupies. Guy Lodge at Variety put it plainly: the film is "smarter, wilder and funnier before the monsters enter the equation." He is right, and the title tells you exactly how long the good version lasts.

I want to be careful about what I am saying. This is not a badly made film. John Powell's score is doing more work than a Minions movie requires, the gag construction is tighter than anything in Despicable Me 4, and the voice bench (Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch) is used rather than just booked. It is a good movie that gets scared of itself in the back half and reaches for the thing it thinks a summer audience paid for.

The numbers say the same thing, from both directions

Critics loved it. It sits at 89% on Rotten Tomatoes off 161 reviews, Illumination's best score ever on the site, with a 70 on Metacritic. Clint Worthington gave it three and a half stars at RogerEbert.com and called it "the snappiest, most cohesive, and entertaining entry in this series to date."

The audience is warmer than it is hot. The Rotten Tomatoes audience score is 75%. PostTrak has only 58% of moviegoers saying they would definitely recommend it, which is soft for a Minions movie, even against an A- CinemaScore. And the opening was the franchise's worst: $62 million over five days on an $85 million budget, in a July where families already had Toy Story 5 and now a live-action Moana to choose from. Two weekends in, it has $108 million domestic and $280 million worldwide, so it will be fine. It is not a phenomenon.

Read those two sets of numbers together and you get the same review twice. The people who care about film history got a movie about film history. Everyone else got forty minutes of that and then a monster.

Verdict

Take the kids. Enjoy the first hour more than they do. There is a version of this movie that ends with James premiering his little silent monster picture to a room of people who are moved by it, and Coffin can clearly see that version, because he keeps gesturing at it right up until the squid shows up. He made the best Minions movie anyone has made. He was two reels from making a good movie, full stop.