International Morons of Mystery

One of the life lessons I came though the late unpleasantness having learned was that it really isn’t necessary to go and see films you’re likely to violently dislike just because they look intriguingly awful, or out of a strange sense of masochistic duty: hence the fact that I have spared myself from seeing Peter Rabbit 2 and you have been spared reading my howls of outrage and despair about it. And yet, just recently I found myself invited to go and see Kyle Balda and Pierre Coffin’s Minions: The Rise of Gru and accepting said invitation with nary a pause. Then again, it was my old friend (and frequent presence on the blog) Olinka doing the inviting.

I don’t think the circumstances in which I ended up seeing the first Minions in 2015 have ever properly been recounted here on the blog. The conversation ran along the lines of ‘Let’s go to the pictures!’/’What’s on?’/’Terminator 5!’/’What else is on?’/’Err… Minions? But I want to see Terminator 5.’/’I don’t want to see Terminator 5. Let’s watch Minions.’/’I don’t want to watch Minions.’/’Well, let’s compromise then.’/ (some time later) ’Two tickets for Minions, please.’ However, I did have the last laugh as my then-partner agreed with me that Minions was mostly a load of old tat. Nevertheless, it made a billion dollars, which naturally spells one thing and one thing only: sequel! But how does it score on the whole load of old tat front?

Well. This time around we find ourselves in a rather peculiar version of the middle 1970s, in a world where supervillains are apparently ubiquitous but there seem to be no actual superheroes. Pre-pubescent miscreant Gru (Steve Carell, bravely hoiking his voice into a higher register) is seeking to establish himself as potential supervillain material, although whether the fact he is the master of the minions – a vast tribe of seemingly-indestructible little yellow morons – is a help or a hindrance to this end seems to be rather in the balance.

Nevertheless, he finds himself on the interview shortlist when leading villain team the Vicious Six have an internal squabble and a vacancy opens up. They have recently taken possession of an important plot-device amulet which they can potentially use to get up to all sorts of shenanigans. However, the important plot-device amulet gets stolen and misplaced several more times, becoming an object of desire for pretty much every major character, and putting Gru and the minions on course for a confrontation with their older, larger, and much more competent rivals…

I have to report that of our quartet who attended the movie (me, my co-spousal unit, Olinka, and her progenate Danya), I was the one who laughed least, by quite some way. But it is still a relief to be able to say that this is most likely a rather better movie than the first one; I may not have laughed a great deal, but it’s diverting and rather curious in places, and the 87 minutes or so I invested in it shimmied by mostly painlessly.

Should we address the whole I-didn’t-laugh-much issue? I expect so. Well, you know, what I can say; it’s not like I sat in stony-faced silence all the way through, I just found a lot of the jokes to be quite predictable, and the kind of slapstick which the movie frequently defaults to isn’t quite my thing. To be honest, I found some of the casting decisions to be much wittier and more impudent than anything in the script: there’s a French-accented supervillain called Jean-Clawed who’s played by Jean-Claude Van Damme, and a roller-blading Scandi villain named Svengeance who’s voiced by Dolph Lundgren. (The film’s inventiveness when it comes to ridiculous parody supervillains is admittedly very impressive – Lucy Lawless pops up as a habit-wearing, chain-stick wielding dominatrix calling herself Nun-Chuck.)

Actually, as an animated superhero movie, comedy spoof or not, this is technically extremely well done – as well as the designs of the various characters, the chases and fights are handled with real verve and inventiveness; they are entertaining in their own right and often quite exciting.

However, for me the most striking thing about the film was the element that wasn’t pitched at a very young audience. It’s customary in many of these films to include an element of some kind that will probably go sailing over the heads of the juvenile audience but nevertheless amuse and entertain the adult audience specifically: they’re the ones who are buying the tickets, after all.

The thing about how Minions 2 handles this is that most of the cultural references and parodies that it throws in for the adults are ones that the kids hopefully won’t get anyway: it’s the mid 1970s, so of course the characters go and see Jaws on the big screen. There are also allusions to blaxploitation movies, classic James Bond films, and martial arts films (the minions adopt Bruce Lee-style yellow jumpsuits for one sequence). As well as being a frantic, silly comedy, the film works on a whole other and entirely separate level as well, which is a rather curious achievement. (I should say that in an unexpected and most likely coincidental development, it also has a few points of connection with Everything Everywhere All At Once, most obviously a character played by Michelle Yeoh.)

I was trying to figure out just what Minions: Rise of Gru reminded me of when it came to me: this is like an animated version of an Austin Powers movie, only not as funny or inventive and with all the gross-out stuff and filthy jokes edited out. Whether that sounds appealing or not probably depends on your view of the Austin Powers franchise; personally I wouldn’t say I really missed it, but the first two films certainly had some very funny moments in them.

What this particular film lacks in consistency it certainly makes up for in sheer energy and work-rate; the pace never slackens and it never shows signs of running out of ideas. Most of it still occurs in the same register of manic stupidity, but it’s generally good-hearted. Rather to my surprise, I found it rather hard to dislike. Don’t necessarily put my name down for the next instalment yet, but don’t automatically write me off either.