The best Minions movie is a silent-Hollywood love letter with a monster movie stapled to it

Illumination figured out a long time ago that the Minions sell lunchboxes better than they carry movies. For most of the last decade that was the whole model: line up the gibberish, move the plush toy, cash the check. Minions & Monsters is the first one in years where the movie under the merchandising is worth talking about. For its first forty minutes it is the best thing the studio has made since the 2010 Despicable Me. Then the monsters arrive and it turns into something you have watched a hundred times.

Start with the good, because there is a real movie in here. The setup is 1920s Hollywood. The Minions want to be stars, go looking for a boss worth serving, and end up loose on silent film sets. Director Pierre Coffin, who also voices every one of the little yellow guys, and co-writer Brian Lynch build the comedy out of actual silent-era craft. The pratfalls are staged like Chaplin, Keaton and Harold Lloyd routines, and the film understands why those routines worked in the first place. IndieWire's Wilson Chapman called the approach "genuinely inspired, textually connecting their slapstick to the very roots of moviemaking," and he is right. The gags are built rather than tossed at the screen, and for a stretch the movie is doing something no Minions picture has bothered to try: teaching a five-year-old what a Buster Keaton gag looks like without ever saying the name.

TheWrap's Drew Taylor found the first hour building to "an open-hearted tribute to the power of the communal moviegoing experience that is unexpectedly emotional." That is the movie I wanted to keep watching.

Then the title comes due

The film is called Minions & Monsters, and eventually the monsters show up. Once they do, the silent-Hollywood picture packs up and a standard save-the-world climax moves in. It is loud and busy, and it is the exact animated third act you can set your watch to. The Hollywood Reporter's Frank Scheck put it plainly: the film "degenerates into the usual over-the-top freneticism afflicting so many animated films geared to kids." The Austin Chronicle's Kimberley Jones was blunter, calling the Hollywood setting "just window dressing for a fairly generic disaster movie."

Here is where I want to be fair, because there is a difference between "I didn't like it" and "it is badly made." The back half is not badly made. The animation is clean and the pacing holds. The target audience is not going to be bored for a second. It is just ordinary, and it follows forty minutes that were anything but. The Guardian's Rafaela Bassili caught the exact shape of the letdown: the film "circles back to where it started."

Not every critic even bought the first half. Kyle Smith at the Wall Street Journal thought the smart gags "peter out after half an hour" and wrote off the rest as "broad, brainless physical comedy aimed at 5-year-olds." That is the floor of the reaction, and it is worth hearing before you buy a ticket. I land closer to the raves, which is why the drop-off stings instead of just confirming low expectations.

The part that does not add up

Minions & Monsters is the best-reviewed movie the franchise has ever put out, sitting around 89 percent on Rotten Tomatoes with an A-minus CinemaScore from opening-night crowds. It is also tracking the softest opening in franchise history. It took about $13.75 million on Wednesday and is aiming for roughly $80 million across the five-day July 4 frame, a number earlier Minions movies cleared without breaking a sweat. The best word of mouth the series has ever had, arriving on a holiday weekend, did not buy the usual crowd. Make of that what you will about how much reviews move a Minions ticket.

The verdict

See it for the first act. Coffin smuggled a real love letter to silent comedy inside a kids' movie, and for a good stretch it is funny and unexpectedly sincere about why people ever went to the movies at all. It cannot hold that altitude, and it settles for a climax the franchise could have generated in its sleep. That is still the best this series has been since Gru first showed up, and the gap between the movie it almost is and the movie it becomes is the most interesting thing playing in a multiplex this weekend.

BCN Score: 74 out of 100.