Life is hard. Life is grim. Life is, dare I say it, evil at times?
Which is why, whether you’re a kid or an adult, but I would wager especially if you’re adult, you need some silliness, some whimsy, some off the chart mischief, best delivered if you’re looking for fun of the soul-refreshingly mindless variety, by the Minions who over the course of a few movies now, have proven themselves to be just what the spirit lifting doctor ordered.
In their latest adventure, Minions; The Rise of Gru we get a prequel of sorts as we’re taken back to the early days of Gru (Steve Carell) the master villain, when he was a cherubic 11-year-old only plotting world domination and not actually doing it.
Well, to be fair “cherubic” is not really apt with Gru looking for all the world (he’s about to take over) like a reject from The Addams Family, who spends his days, when not in school being ridiculed for wanting to become said master villain – everyone else picks doctor, or lawyer or singing President but not Gru – and building his lair, or watching the Minions build one anyway, down in the basement of the house he spends with his archly acerbic mother.
Yes, Gru has accomplices even at this young age, all of whom answered his ad for henchmen, placed, since this is 1976 and all, via a newspaper ad which the Minions clutch when they first turn up en masse at his home like it’s a holy scripture leading them to their saviour.
The meeting with the Minions, which takes places in a very fake rain-soaked flashback, is hilarious and sets the tone for the film which, it will not surprise you to learn, does not treat itself too seriously, skating by on the most wafer thin of plots and a penchant for silly sight gags and some lightweight but effective parodying of old kung fu movies, James Bond film opening credits and just about anything pop culture oriented from the ’70s.
The film revolves around, as much as it revolves around anything, Gru’s desperately enthusiastic quest to join the Vicious 6, six flamboyantly-garbed villains led by Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin) – well, until it’s not and fabulously evil Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson) takes over in an aerial coup somewhere over China – and composed of lobster-appendaged Jean-Clawed (Jean-Claude Van Damme), rebellious nun, Nun-chuck (Lucy Lawless), roller skater Svengeance (Dolph Lundgren) and big metal hands-equipped Stronghold (Danny Trejo) – whom Gru idolises like most kidslook up to sports or pop stars.
He has their posters on his bedroom wall, all he talks about is being one of them and so, when the opportunity comes up to interview the group due to the engineered vacancy referred to earlier, he jumps at the chance to get his career of evil off to a glorious start.
And that, really, is the story; gilded around it are all sorts of Karate Kid moments, both for Gru who ends up with Wild Knuckles as a weirdly caring faux father figure and villainy mentor, and the chief Minions – Kevin, Stuart, Bob, Otto, all of whom are voiced with giddy hilarity and squeaky glee by Pierre Coffin whose gift for nonsensical language and childlike vivacity is a joy to behold – who find in Master Chow (Michelle Yeow who brings life to everything she takes on) the kung fu teacher they didn’t know they needed.
While Minions; The Rise of Gru is ostensibly about the Vicious 6 and their plan to use a Chinese Zodiac medallion, retrieved from a waterfall-cloaked, booby trap-laced cave a la Tomb Raider or Indiana Jones, the film happily bounces from one loosely related scene to another, more concerned with the heartfelt devotion to Gru that the Minions possess despite more than a few reasons not to, and an obsession with OTT moments – the scene where the Minions fly a plane to San Francisco with only bare adherence to a flight manual is worth the price of admission alone – than with telling any kind of involved or even meaningful story.
Which honestly is fine; not every animated film has to be Pixar or Disney level intense and there’s something liberating, even if you’re an understandably huge of the two animation powerhouses, with just throwing all the existential safeties off and going for anarchically silly animated comedic lunacy.
In fact, because it is so escapistly nonsensical, you find Minions; The Rise of Gru races past before your eyes, a riot of vivacious colour, absurdly silly moments and some stab at emotional meaning, which wastes no time dwelling on anything of real import.
A love letter to the madcap garishness of the 1970s, which when you think about it, is the perfect era for the Minions, Minions; The Rise of Gru is one of those animated films which disappears in your memory like a puff of smoke the moments the fun-filled credits finish rolling, but which delights you, and your kids, like nothing else while it’s in a whir of kinetic motion.
Much of the delight comes down, of course, to the titular characters, who are a gleeful mix of childlike and calculating, a canny coming together of two disparate elements that works a treat when you’re small and yellow and determined to carve a career out in the villainy business.
So much of a presence are they in the film, and let’s face it, they should be since they’re all across the title of the film which clearly asserts the days of Gru being the Despicable Me-centre of this franchise’s storytelling universe are long gone, that the rest of the characters, fun though they might be to watch, are really only supporting characters, and the blink-and-you’ll-miss-it plot is really in evidence to give a scaffolding for the laughter-filled inanity of the Minions to really let loose.
All of which, as stated, is totally fine, because in a world which makes a ton of demands of us and which begs us to feel things and learn things and do things – all fine activities but a little bit of mindless chill time is also necessary – having a film as joyously undemanding and giddily escapist as Minions; The Rise of Gru is blissfully, wonderfully, joyously great and precisely what you need to make life feel a little less heavy, if only for 1 1/2 hours of inspired animated comedy.