Minions & Monsters

When the yellow perils manage to gatecrash a film studio and cause havoc on the set of a film, the director is terrified that his two rotund bosses will want his head. Instead, though, they adore the chaos and commission him to make more films featuring the "Minions". Swiftly, they go from rags to riches and are hugely popular until... Sound. Silent movies have gone the way of the dodo and now there is to be audio. Yikes - who wants to sit in a drive-in and listen to lots of squeaking and squawking coming from these diminutive stars? Well, nobody really and so swiftly they are back out on poverty row once more with nowhere to go. "James" and his pal "Henry" conclude that their film-making days are not yet over when their erstwhile director gives them an old boxed Brownie, but they need a baddie. What better one than a monster, and when they stumble upon an ancient book of spells and arouse the mischievous "Goomi" they appear to have solved their problem - without realising that this isn't so much a big jelly of a stage beastie, it's one that is being controlled to absorb everything in it's path be that animal, mineral or solid concrete. Now it is the pretty urgent task of these "Minions" to reverse their spell before they, and all of their fellows, become extinct. Aside from this being quite an entertaining homage to the golden days of Hollywood it's all just a terribly predictable and dare I say forgettable affair. I enjoyed the "Minions" best when they were the henchies of the menacing "Gru", but here the whole thing just lacks soul a bit and the normally appealing gibberish - where we try to pick out actual words in any language from their twittering - started to annoy me for the first time as this stretched out what felt like an half-hour television episode into a thinly-spread feature. For some reason, it's told to us via a reflective narration from a museum curator so there isn't even any jeopardy either, and I left thinking it really quite disappointing. Certainly it's a watchable effort and the kids in the cinema did seem to love it, but there's much less for those grown-ups amongst us and it seems to content to rest on it's previous laurels a little too much for me.