So far, this summer, the big movies have just barely cleared the bar of being ‘good’  so I went in to Minions with slightly low expectations. The biggest question was, can you have a good movie that runs for 90 minutes with characters who speak gibberish?   The answer is yes, but you have to really balance it out with a lot of visual gags.

The 1^st act of the movie is the trailer we have seen, plus more, which is how the Minions came to be. They always stayed in search of an evil master but because of their bumbling, their masters met bizarre and untimely ends. Things really go sideways when they mess over Napoleon. The Minions strike out on their own and with no master to serve, create their own society in an ice cave. The problem is, they were created to serve so after spending so many years in isolation they become depressed and lazy.   Three of their number decides to leave the cave to save their kind by finding the ultimate master.

They reach the United States just in time to hear about an event called Villain-Con (and nice timing to release this movie on the same weekend as SDCC) where they get to win the prize of working for Scarlett Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock).

Now, as an adult, it’s hard to be really critical for a movie geared to kids who loved the Despicable Me franchise. Kids will like what they like. But, in my opinion, it didn’t stand up as well as the prior 2 movies.   It’s a good origin story for sure, but it’s really hard to not see some of the flaws of the movie.

The biggest issue is for nearly every time the Minions are on screen, they have to be doing ‘something’ otherwise their screen presence could have gotten annoying and old. This actually was a mixed blessing. Because this was set in the 60’s some of jokes may have went over the heads of the intended audience. It could have been a smarter movie but again, the target audience here is the small kids and the kids just want to see them ‘go’. And that’s just what they do. I felt like I wanted the Minions to be a little smarter and more clever but then, they wouldn’t be Minions if they were. Another issue is that when they run across a family of bank robbers who eventually get them to Villain-Con, I felt like that moment was over way too soon. Lastly, I just wasn’t feeling Sandra Bullock as Overkill. She had her moments but she wasn’t villain material to me. She didn’t live up to the name of her character and just feel flat for me.

What did I like about the movie? I did love the gags. I am really thankful that unlike other movies, they didn’t give away all of the goods in the trailer.  As I said earlier, part of what I really feared was how to pull this movie off with creatures that mostly spoke gibberish. The gags and mischief at times were funny, but as I said earlier, when some of them ran along too far, it was almost refreshing to see a human come along and break it up. In its own way, Minions tried to be everything to everybody and you either come away satisfied or you may feel like you missed something.

3 Lines of Spoken Gibberish out of 5