I went into this expecting another round of banana jokes stretched across ninety minutes, and for the first half hour, that’s basically what you get — but then something clicks, and the movie turns into something weirder and more sincere than I was ready for.
The setup is almost absurdly specific: a Universal Studios tour guide walks a group of kids through a hall of movie memorabilia, and that becomes the framing device for the real story — two Minions, James and Henry, who land in 1920s Hollywood and discover they’d rather make movies than serve some new evil boss. That’s the whole engine of the film, and it’s a stranger choice than the marketing lets on. This isn’t really about world domination or finding the next Gru. It’s about two yellow guys who want to direct.
What surprised me is how much the film actually cares about old Hollywood as a subject, not just a backdrop. There are sight gags built around silent-era filmmaking, a passing nod to Eadweard Muybridge’s motion studies, and a joke about a fictional studio’s poster slate that’s funnier the more film history you happen to know. None of it is required to enjoy the movie if you’re eight years old, but it’s clearly there for anyone who’s sat through a few too many “Singin’ in the Rain” rewatches. James’s arc — chasing an Oscar that in this universe is literally a gold banana — works because the film commits to the bit instead of winking at it.
Where it loses me a little is the back half. Once sound cinema arrives and James’s silent-comedy stardom collapses, the story splits: James and Henry chase the dream of directing an actual monster movie, while the rest of the Minions get folded into a subplot involving a robot named Dort and a suffragette character named Debbie. The Dort material isn’t bad exactly, it’s just a different movie — broader, more plot-mechanical, less interested in the specific joke the first act was telling. By the time the spellbook gets opened and an honestly pretty charming demon named Goomi shows up to unleash a small army of monsters, the film has shifted from “clever Hollywood satire” to “standard third-act monster brawl,” and you can feel the gears change.
Goomi himself is fun without being especially memorable — he’s got a good design and a couple of solid line reads, but he’s more catalyst than character. The monsters he summons are mostly there to fill the frame with chaos rather than to mean anything individually, which is a missed opportunity given how thoughtful the first half is about why James wants to make a monster movie in the first place.
Still, even when the plot gets baggy, the craft holds up. The opening title sequence alone — rewinding through every era of the Universal logo back to the silent age — is a better piece of franchise-loyalty filmmaking than most studios manage in an entire movie. And there’s a sweetness underneath all the noise: by the end, this isn’t really about saving the world from monsters, it’s about why people fall in love with the act of making films together in the first place. That’s a strange thing for a Minions movie to be about, and it mostly works.
Is it a clean three-act structure? No. The second half noticeably loses the thread the first half laid down so carefully. But for a franchise seven entries deep, the fact that it has an actual point of view at all — about craft, about collaboration, about a dumb yellow guy who just wants to point a camera at something — counts for a lot. I laughed more than I expected to, and I cared more than I expected to, which is the rare combination that makes a kids’ movie worth recommending to people without kids.
Recommended, with the caveat that you’ll like the front half more than the back half — and that’s fine.
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