This film is rated H for Honest
From Universal Pictures' marketing department comes one of the most expensive, far-reaching promotional campaigns of all time, and also a movie: Minions.
You loved the first two Despicable Me's. Now, in the tradition of Joey, The Cleveland Show, and The Battle for Endor, comes a spin-off that takes a character who's fun in small doses and makes you wish they stayed in the background. Get ready for a Minions origin story that doesn't even tell you what a Minion is, or where their language comes from, or whether they're immortal, or whether they have genders, or why some have one eye, or why they always wear goggles, or how they reproduce. But who cares? You're either six years old or a parent wishing they could check their phone in the movie theater.
Steve Carell is back...at the very end for, like, thirty seconds to remind you how much better this movie would have been with little Gru and some Minion babies. Instead, hang with his bland replacement, Scarlet Overkill, who has our three heroes steal the queen's crown, which they do, then she hates them...? (Scarlet Overkill: I don't want you to take this the wrong way, but I hate you.)...in ninety minutes of lazy gags that makes Cars 2 look like the beginning of Up, featuring all these 1960s references that don't belong in a movie for little kids or their thirtysomething parents. But they will repeat the word "banana" over and over again, so at least it's got that going for it.
Try to undo the harmful messages the movie will drill into your kids' impressionable heads, like "be a mindless follower", "don't question authority", and "shooting at the cops is okay as long as you're little and cute". Y'know, for kids' characters, they really do kill a lotta people (shows an increasing death count for the Minions).
So after Pixar showed us that children's movies can be great (shows clips from Inside Out) and The LEGO Movie proved that even shameless marketing can be fun, let Minions remind you that cynical studio branding exercises make just as crappy films as you'd expect.
Starring Sandra Bollocks (Sandra Bullock as Scarlet Overkill), SpongeBob RoundPants (Pierre Coffin as Bob), Stewart Little (Pierre Coffin as Stuart), Kevin Hart (Pierre Coffin as Kevin), Only 2 Minutes of Gru for Some Reason (Steve Carell as Gru), and Those Horrible Facebook Memes Your Aunt Keeps Posting That Don't Have Anything to Do with Minions At All.
Despicable Greed.
If they hadn't gotten stuck in that ice cave, the Minions totally would've helped Hitler and the Nazis, too, right?