Minions: The Rise of Gru hits theaters on July 1, 2022.
It would be a fool’s errand to judge a Minions movie on anything except its own terms, but figuring out what those terms even are is a challenge. The Minions, with their speech comprising made-up French, bits of English and Spanish, and near-total gibberish, are the kind of babbling caricatures used to entertain babies, yet they’ve taken on a life of their own on social media, as digital stationery for wine aunts and weird uncles to type up harmless mundanities (“Exercise? I thought you said extra fries!”) The Despicable Me series has an entire history behind it (or rather, ahead of it; The Rise of Gru is a prequel), so it must serve a narrative function, and as a movie, it technically has a story and characters, but they all exist in service of slapstick gags that may as well be isolated vignettes.
Wrapped up in all this is the question of who this movie is for, if the Minions rose to prominence over a decade ago? The teens who were children during the first Despicable Me? Probably not. Little kids today? Perhaps. Their millennial parents? Maybe, but the film’s 1970s setting leads to a flood of period-specific allusions aimed at Boomers and Gen X’ers. Am I thinking too hard about this? Absolutely, but it’s difficult not to in a year that gave us the Pixar instant-classic Turning Red. Minions: The Rise of Gru is ultimately inoffensive, but children deserve a little better than a flurry of random images that feel barely connected.
The prologue gives us a fun look at a group of baddies, the Vicious 6, as they steal an ancient artifact. There’s Taraji P. Henson’s Belle Bottom, whose abilities aren’t quite clear, but there’s also Svengeance, a Mad Max-style roller-skater voiced by Dolph Lundgren, Danny Trejo as the metal-handed Stronghold, and the two most amusingly conceived villains in the group, Lucy Lawless as Nunchucks (a nunchuck-wielding nun), and Jean-Clawed, a Frenchman with an enormous lobster claw, voiced by none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme. Rounding out the crew is Alan Arkin’s Wild Knuckles, an aged martial artist who gets booted from the team as soon as he helps them steal an ancient pendant. He’s the closest thing the movie has to an actual character, since his five former teammates mostly melt into the background as an indecipherable blob (a handful of funny gags aside).
Sometime later, we’re reintroduced to little Gru (a pitch-shifted Steve Carell), whose dreams of supervillainy get him laughed at by his classmates (if you think this embarrassment might inform his story, think again). And of course, what would Gru be without the Minions in his basement, hundreds of whom appear on screen, but four of whom are the actual focus. The main three were pseudo-characters in the 2015 Minions film. They don’t have distinct personalities as much as they do recognizable shapes — there’s the short two-eyed one (Bob), the short one-eyed one (Stuart), and the tall one (Kevin) — and joining them this time is Otto, a round one with braces. He screws up a lot. Gru yells at him and doubts him, the same way other people doubt Gru’s own capacity for mischief, but neither of these things amount to very much.
Whatever semblance of story The Rise of Gru features, it wobbles like the empty skin-suit of a real kids’ movie.
Gru’s story revolves around auditioning for the Vicious 6, and subsequently crossing paths with its disgraced former founder, Wild Knuckles, who, it turns out, is Gru’s favorite villain. Knuckles is a loner with henchmen who he treats like garbage. Gru is pretty much the same. And yet, their collective coming-to-Jesus moment exists only theoretically, through tonally “serious” scenes that make them reflect on no one and nothing in particular, and for no real reason.
Whatever semblance of story The Rise of Gru features, it wobbles like the empty skin-suit of a real kids’ movie (like the three Despicables Me!). It sends Kevin, Stuart, and Bob in one direction, and Otto in another, on divergent missions to help Gru, but both storylines seem to suffer from severe cases of anti-drama and anti-comedy. The Minions are on a mission, and part of the fun stems from them being chaotic yellow pill-creatures pretending to be people via an assortment of costumes, but no one seems to really care that they’re Minions at the end of the day. Some of their jokes are dialogue-based, but they depend on being able to decipher literal gibberish. When the Minions come up against obstacles, they usually talk(?) their way out in a matter of seconds — which also makes the involvement of side characters voiced by Michelle Yeoh, Julie Andrews, and RZA speed by without impact — and when they do cause a ruckus, it’s usually the result of “lol random” decisions that are fully at odds with whatever they’re trying to achieve in a given scene. It shouldn’t matter, but the Minions’ Gru-centric objectives are pretty much the only things that define them as “characters,” in the broadest sense. If the humor doesn’t stem from these annoying little goblins trying to do meaningful human things, then it rests solely on their buttocks sticking out of their overalls, a gag that repeats itself like clockwork every 10 or 15 minutes.
Minions: The Rise of Gru has a plot, but no story. It features references, but few jokes. Ultimately, enjoying it comes down to whether or not you can tolerate 90 minutes of “le ooga booga banana por favor,” and if you’re under the age of 3, the answer is probably yes — but in that case, any parent may as well just plop their kid in front of a YouTube playlist of D-Billions instead.
