In just twelve years, Despicable Me has spawned two sequels with one more in development, a spinoff film, a sequel to the spinoff film, a theme park ride, a television holiday special, and possibly quite literally mountains of merchandise for those little yellow indestructible minions.
Reviewing one of the films seems to be almost an exercise in futility. They’re all guaranteed to make money, and even the critical reactions from film to film hardly change. At their best, the films are pleasant time wasters. At their worst, they’re slightly annoying but still relatively harmless. They don’t even have the common decency to be wholly bad, instead settling into that accursed place that’s worse than any film fan could possibly imagine: mediocrity.
“Minions: The Rise of Gru” follows the same three main Minions from the previous film, Kevin, Stuart, and Bob, all voiced by Pierre Coffin (“Despicable Me,” “Minions”), as they try to track down their “mini boss”, a pint-sized young Gru, voiced again by Steve Carell (“The 40 Year Old Virgin,” “Crazy, Stupid, Love”), after he’s kidnapped for stealing the precious Zodiac Stone. This is hardly the only plot thread going, as we also see Gru befriending his captor, his favorite villain Wild Knuckles, voiced by Alan Arkin (“Glengarry Glen Ross,” “The Kominsky Method”), the villain group Vicious Six trying to track down Gru and the Stone, and Otto, one of the Minions, trying to find the Stone for Gru. Oh, and don’t forget when the Minions learn Kung-Fu.
It's truly a grab bag of random plots, with nothing ever fitting together in a cohesive way. It’s as if the writers simply made a dart board of things they hadn’t yet done with the characters and then tossed some darts and wrote the movie. Each voice actor, practically a cameo role at this point, is wasted, apart from possible Taraji P. Henson (“Hidden Figures,” “Think Like A Man”) as Belle Bottom, the leader of the Vicious Six. She at least seems to be having a good time, chewing up every line as if her life depends on it.
But given the film’s cast of action stars and celebrities, it’s almost impressive how they’re squandered. Michelle Yeoh (“Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” “Everything Everywhere All At Once”) voices an acupuncturist and Kung-Fu master who teaches the Minions Kung-Fu. Not only is her delivery flat, the sequence itself feels like a short film that was retrofitted into this movie because it needed to be longer. The cast list also claims that the rest of the Vicious Six are voiced by Jean-Claude Van Damme (“Universal Soldier,” “Jean-Claude Van Johnson”), Lucy Lawless (“Xena: Warrior Princess,” “Ash vs. Evil Dead”), Dolph Lundgren (“Rocky IV,” “Masters of the Universe”), and Danny Trejo (“Spy Kids,” “Machete”), but it wouldn’t be hard to convince a viewer that they were voiced by anyone given that they probably say about ten words between them all in the entire runtime.
It's the sort of film that exists in such a bland, mediocre space that it almost becomes fascinating. How could this many supposedly creative people all work together to create a work this lifeless? At least the previous “Minions” film had an almost Three Stooges angle to its plot and some cleverness with the underground villain organization. There’s nothing here worth writing home about. Nothing at all. And this is supposedly the studio that’s making the first ever animated Mario film in 2023?
Have no fear though, because Illumination’s practice of using the same remarkably bland animation is here in spades. Like their previous films, nothing here looks bad, but nothing looks good either. It’s all so smooth and shiny, like someone focus tested an art style. It might have been passable at first, but it just looks worse and worse as the years go on. In an age where studios seem to be finally experimenting with their animation styles, with works like “Into the Spider-Verse,” “Turning Red,” and even the upcoming “Puss in Boots: The Last Wish”, it makes this cheap animation look even worse than it already did.
To go even further into criticisms would be an exercise in futility. If such action-packed events took place when Gru was a child, why was this never mentioned in the other films? Why do we need to see the younger versions of these background characters from the first film as if they’re holy figures from fiction? What are the biological implications of the Minion baby chick? Its maddening to think about any of this for more than a moment, but anyone who goes into “Minions: The Rise of Gru” above the age of 7 will likely think of one of those questions at some point during viewing.
But there’s no better question that sums up the film and its issues than this: if the point of the first film was that Gru wasn’t in it and it focused on the Minions, then why is this not just “Despicable Me 4” or “Despicable Me Jr.”? Why even call it a Minions movie if it has only slightly more Minion than the regular “Despicable Me” films? Questions like that will likely be wondered about until the end of time. In other news, film reviewer found dead during credits of latest “Minions” movie. The cause of death: lethal amounts of mediocre filmmaking. 2/5
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