A sequel to the 2015 prequel spin-off to the 2010 original—yes, this is a deliberate mouthful—Illumination and Universal Picture’s Minions: The Rise of Gru, offers more of the same, to largely predictable and forgettable results, with its makers Kyle Balda and Matthew Fogel seemingly content with easy box office success over improving on previous entries. And in what has been a fairly dull 2022 for animation films, Minions: The Rise of Gru is just another subpar serving.
However, this wasn’t always the case for this lucrative franchise. When Chris Renaud and Pierre Coffin’s Despicable Me premiered at the Moscow International Film Festival in June 2010, the animated movie industry was in a completely different place compared to today.
3D conversion was still this new-fangled technology that studios would tack on during post-production to justify higher ticket prices. Global box offices, critical acclaim and awards attention were largely a two-way battle between Disney-owned Pixar and Viacom-owned DreamWorks, with smaller studios like Blue Sky and Aardman Animations making sporadic strides.
The acclaim received by Despicable Me brought in a new player to upset the apple cart, Comcast-owned Illumination Entertainment, which in the original Despicable Me, had a similar marriage between broad, silly humour and emotional depth to appeal to children and adults alike, and also spent far less money on making its films.
Twelve years, two sequels, two prequel spin-offs and billions of merchandising revenue later, a lot has changed in the industry, barring the continued obsession with tacky theatrical 3D releases. In mainstream cinema, much of it has been for the worse, with these established studios mass-producing content to sell merchandise, and the worst offender by far has been Illumination’s flagship franchise.
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Pretty colours, predictable humour
Indeed, Minions: The Rise of Gru can basically be reduced to pretty colours, predictable jokes and cookie-cutter comic book action, set to pleasant but generic ‘70s-inspired pop music, with plenty of easter eggs to the previous films for diehard fans to enjoy.
And that is incredibly unfortunate, given the potential shown from this series and production crew in 2010. I have always been a fan of the Minion characters, but only in small doses or bit-part roles, especially when they were given proper comedic timing in the original film to do what they do best, that is, get into extremely stupid yet universally funny situations all while jabbering in some backwards mishmash of English, Spanish, French and Italian.
There is only one sequence in this film that harkens back to the level of humour seen in Despicable Me, as director Kyle Balda and writer Matthew Fogel show how three of the Minions disguise themselves as airline crew, and make sense of how to fly to San Francisco as a cover of ‘Blue Danube’ plays in the background.
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Any creativity goes for a toss
Yet, more often than not, in the last nine years since Despicable Me 2, they’ve come across as lazy caricatures performing gags lifted from series like Tom & Jerry, Looney Tunes and The Pink Panther, that did far better with significantly less runtime and fewer resources 60 years ago.
Any creativity or heart this franchise had, died once the credits of the 2010 original began rolling, with antagonist Vector (voiced by Jason Segel) left stranded on the moon. Every subsequent new supporting character, villain or storyline in the sequels and prequels are better seen as cardboard cut-outs rather than anything fully formed.
The same applies to Minions: The Rise of Gru, as the array of antagonists appear as a pretext for Illumination to hire big-names to play generic, second-rate comic book characters. The action, too, looks like an attempt to cash in on the Marvel-DC craze, but with significantly less effort that animated films like Into the SpiderVerse had magnificently capitalised on in recent years.
Unless you want your 6-year-old kid to be the only kind of person massively into this, as a parent, you’re better off staying home this weekend to rewatch the original Despicable Me or DreamWorks’ Megamind instead. It is the same premise anyway, done a million times better.
(Edited by Zoya Bhatti)