Review: Minions: The Rise of Gru (2022)

Minions: The Rise of Gru

Rating

Director

Kyle Balda, Brad Ableson, Jonathan del Val

Screenplay

Matthew Fogel, Brian Lynch, Matthew Fogel

Length

1h 27m

Starring

Steve Carell, Pierre Coffin, Alan Arkin, Taraji P. Henson, Michelle Yeoh, Julie Andrews, Russell Brand, Jean-Claude Van Damme, Dolph Lundgren, Danny Trejo, Lucy Lawless

MPAA Rating

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Review

Another trip to the cineplex for the critters that built Illumination, Minions: The Rise of Gru tries very hard to deliver on its promise of excessive and unending laughter with seriously mixed results.

While the minions themselves have always been brilliant punchlines, they’ve never been the kinds of characters that deserve their own film. The original Minions was a downgrade from the Despicable Me films and highlighted how quickly the simplemindedness of the creatures could wear thin. Yet, a second film was ordered because of the huge success of the mind numbingly-banal prior version and there’s no hint that they’ve managed to learn a lesson with this movie.

Minions: The Rise of Gru moves the story forward to 1976 where a precocious villain-in-the-making gets the opportunity to pledge his services to the notorious Vicious 6, a supervillain group who double-crossed its previous leader and is in need of a new member. Gru (Steve Carell) wants desperately to be part of the group he’s long looked up to, but his age and timidity earn him ridicule from the group, yet his inventiveness enables him to steal from them the artifact they plan to unleash on the Chinese New Year. The ineptitude of his minions and the reemergence of the fallen leader conspire to bring the multiple forces to bear against one another in a chaotic melee to end the film.

Individual bits in the film work, most notably the minions stealing and flying a plane to San Francisco, but they are parts of a flawed whole that struggles to maintain momentum, shifting from one segment of lunacy to another with the thinnest of plot threads to bring them together. That Michelle Yeoh got pulled into this mess and was given the role of a platitude-spouting acupuncturist who is also a former Kung Fu master is a disappointment for her fans and it ultimately adds almost nothing to the film itself.

Yeoh’s vocal performance matches the weakness of the character’s story arc, sounding weary only shortly before the audience feels the same. Pierre Coffin (as the main minion characters) never disappoints with his line delivery, not that he has much to do without understandable dialogue. Carell doesn’t fare much better while Alan Arkin, Taraji P. Henson, and others, who voice the major bad guys, sound like they are putting forth the smallest effort possible to get the film out the door without risking their reputations. It doesn’t entirely work, but you can’t blame actors for having nothing to work with.

Screenwriters Matthew Fogel and Brian Lynch manage to accomplish as a pair what Disney’s cadres of writers have to put forth with a large writers room: making the effort feel overfull with comic moments that don’t reveal deeper truths about the storyline.

Apart from the notion of individuality and discrediting age as a barrier to success, Minions: The Rise of Gru rides entirely on the fumes of its inept yellow punchlines. Someone passionate for these little characters and their barrel bottom-scraping humor will undoubtedly be delighted and some of the animation is strong. In the end, though, the only people likely to be thoroughly pleased by the entirety of the output are small children, who don’t understand narrative complexity to begin with, and ardent fans who don’t care if every joke lands as long as enough of them do to be entertaining.