There’s something charmingly throwback about the Minions, Despicable Me’s affable henchmen who became franchise regulars and then spun off into their own standalone series. That’s the kind of plotline you might catch on Turner Classic Movies, wherein the anonymous day player steps out from the shadows and becomes the star, and anybody who still holds TCM dear in their heart is going to get a kick out of Minions & Monsters’ setting at the dawn of the Golden Age of Hollywood.
It takes a little while to arrive in Tinseltown, but M&M’s preamble is its best stretch: a romp through eras as the little yellow guys go in search of a “big boss” to serve. Agents of unintentional chaos, the Minions – most especially James, a dreamer and born storyteller, and his best buddies Henry and the hearing-impaired and nonverbal Ed, our heroes – accidentally undermine every evil master they pledge fealty to. These setpieces are darling confections: visually inventive, fleet, and furiously funny.
Eventually the gang crash lands in La La Land at the height of its excess – shades of Babylon: Minions – where they improbably become screen sensations, until the advent of sound film threatens to end their run as swiftly as it did Lina Lamont’s. The Minions’ squeaky soup of Romance languages studded with non sequiturs and nonsense words may be big business in the 21st century, but apparently 1930s audiences couldn’t make sense of them… even if everybody at the studio lot understood them fine? I don’t know; the internal logic here eludes me.
Few of the side characters are terribly sticky, aside from a robot (voiced by Jesse Eisenberg) whose wide-swiveling joints are an animated delight, and the Trey Parker-voiced Goomi, a green, Lovecraftian creation adorably repackaged as a mini-monster. The Minions are voiced, as ever, by Pierre Coffin, co-director of the first three Despicable Me films and the first spinoff, 2015’s superior Minions; Coffin also co-wrote the script (with Brian Lynch). Arguably he is the world’s foremost authority on what makes a Minion tick. Keeping the audience’s interest is less of a lock. It’s a slow tire leak of a movie: The buoyant beginning had me, but I was checking my watch at 40 minutes.
Film nerds will savor Minions & Monsters’ hat tips to early cinema luminaries like Muybridge, Lumière, and Méliès, plus cameos from the likes of Buster Keaton, Orson Welles, and Metropolis’ Maschinenmensch; if one kid comes out of this thing saying, “Mommy, tell me more about German Expressionism,” then that sounds like a win. Ultimately, though, the Hollywood setting is just window dressing for a fairly generic disaster movie – noisy, busy, eventually brutalizing in its relentlessness. M&M makes a bid for the anticness of classic Looney Tunes, but misses the essential part that a contrasting quiet plays in comedy.
Minions & Monsters
2006, PG, 90 min. Directed by Pierre Coffin. Voices by Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr.
This article appears in July 3 • 2026.
