Tuesday, June 30, 2026
Minions & Monsters
This new film sends a tribe of Minions on the same doomed errand that has always defined the species: find the most evil boss imaginable and serve him until everything falls apart. The list is quite long: a cyclops, a mummy, a pirate, an ancient ruler, and a sorcerer. Of course, every gig has ended in catastrophe. It's all narrated in cheerful retrospect by a museum guide named Olivia (voiced by Allison Janney), who claims this is all true and clearly loves how insane that sounds.
This time, the story follows four new characters, all voiced by the film's director Pierre Coffin: Dick, the self-proclaimed leader who treats the evil boss hunt like a sacred calling, and the more wayward trio of James, Henry and Ed. Their search lands them in 1920s Hollywood, where they crash a film set run by Max (voiced by Christoph Waltz), who assumes for a moment that his career just went up in flames.
Instead, the studio's fat bosses (both voiced by Jeff Bridges) spot star power in the Minions. Silent film rewards exactly what these creatures already do best: big feelings, bigger gestures, zero need for a script. The Minions instantly become the unlikeliest movie stars in Hollywood. Then the talking pictures arrive, and the same instincts that made them famous suddenly can't keep them employed. The town that adored them moves on quickly.
None of that backstory matters as much as how it actually feels to watch. The stretch built around the tribe's doomed boss search is the loosest, silliest, and funniest filmmaking these characters have gotten in years. What it taps into is close to the heart: the specific, gleeful chaos of being a kid who knows exactly how much trouble they're about to cause and does it anyway.
This is also where the film is most alive, in its love letter to cinema history. The silent comedy stretches play like the work of a scholar who studied the deadpan precision of Buster Keaton and Charlie Chaplin's physical comedy, and it shows the deepest affection for early Hollywood.
Whether they've got one eye or two, all the Minions are irresistibly cute. Director Pierre Coffin's gibberish baby voice is both amusing and adorable. It sounds as if it's speaking many languages at once, but more often sounds suspiciously like Italian, and even throwing in Mandarin's "thank you" for fun. It comes out as pure, undeniable mischief rather than noise for its own sake.
The trouble starts once the studio moves on and James refuses to. He has fallen hard for moviemaking, and rather than let it go, he talks Henry and Ed into helping him build a monster picture out of his own sketchbook, working from an old boss's stolen spell book.
Here is where the film starts losing the energy that made it funny and adorable. Once the story commits fully to monster territory, the Minions stop being gleeful screwups and start being heroes with a planet to save, and a movie that had been running on mischief suddenly needs its characters to behave and save the world. The chaos gets tidier. The jokes get safer.
None of it collapses, but the air noticeably leaves the room. It doesn't help that the film keeps cutting away from James, Henry and Ed's monster movie to check in on Dick's half of the tribe, who stumble onto Dort (Jesse Eisenberg), a stiff, monotone robot they mistake for their next boss, a character who should have been left out of the movie entirely. Every cut back to it pulls focus from the scrappier, funnier story the Minions are working so hard to tell. It feels like a detour that was allowed to compete with the main event instead of supporting it.
However, that is not enough to sink the experience. Even with a back half that loses its nerve, this is generous, good-natured entertainment built with real craft and obvious affection for movie history, and it never stops being fun to look at. With the heat outside and the depressing news feed around the world, this movie makes the perfect escape.
"Minions & Monsters" opens in theaters on Wednesday, July 1, 2026.
