“Minions & Monsters” Restored My Faith in Humanity (Movie Review)

I am not a Minions guy.

That’s why all the marketing for the new film, Minions & Monsters, caught me so off guard. Generally speaking, Illumination stuff (looking at you, Mario Galaxy) is just very much not my thing: fast-paced, bright-colored, sugar-rush movies made to stimulate children’s brains in the most crude of ways. But the marketing for Minions & Monsters prominently featured black-and-white footage that sought to satirize things like The Maltese Falcon and feature side characters like Charlie Chaplin? And as it turns out, Minions & Monsters is an unexpected delight; one of the most overwhelmingly joyous theatrical viewing experiences I’ve had this year.

TOP FIVE THINGS ABOUT “MINIONS & MONSTERS”

5. The Opening Credits

I’m not sure I can properly express to you just how immediately I realized I was, inexplicably, the exact target demographic for Minions & Monsters. The film opens with the standard Universal title card, which then begins reversing, taking viewers back through over a century of Universal logos. Simply getting to see some of these on the big screen again offered a surface-level thrill in and of itself, but it was what happened next that genuinely floored me.

During the opening credits of the film proper, Minions & Monsters takes the opportunity to showcase a number of highly influential early cinema shorts from the likes of the Lumière brothers and Georges Méliès. These shorts have various Minion characters animated into them but have otherwise been remarkably preserved. Getting to hear a short film from 1895 like The Sprinkler Sprinkled land a huge laugh with modern audiences in the dark of a theater in 2026 was an utter delight and something that endeared this film to me immensely. This opening credits bit is the equivalent of Minions & Monsters throwing down the gauntlet, promising big things to come, and miraculously, the film delivers.

4. John Powell’s Musical Score

From its opening onward, Minions & Monsters is a genre-hopping, zany, surprisingly insightful, and often very funny journey through cinema history. The Minions get unexpectedly wrapped up in the early days of Hollywoodland and make a mad dash through classic cinematic reference points in the process. All of this could have felt surface-level or perfunctory, but instead, it feels deeply passionate and full of adoration for everything it is referencing. A huge part of this comes from the care and dedication that screenwriter Brian Lynch and writer-director Pierre Coffin have clearly put into the project, but another major contributor to selling all of this is John Powell’s musical score.

Powell is an incredibly talented composer who embraces the onscreen mayhem through his own musical compositions. He fully leans into the classical Hollywood influences of the film and brings a sense of gravitas and weight to many of the genre-inspired shenanigans. It’s surprisingly effective.

3. The Gags

There are some great gags sprinkled throughout this thing, especially once the Minions make their way to Hollywood. The central gag that the whole picture hangs on is a kind of ingenious one: what if the Minions became silent-era movie stars, only for the advent of sound to inadvertently derail their Minionese-speaking careers? It’s Singin’ in the Rain with Minions, and it earns every bit of that complimentary comparison.

2. A Gonzo Finale

To be clear, Minions & Monsters plays fast and loose when it comes to the specifics of cinema history, and I see that as a positive thing. For one, it’s a Minion movie; factual accuracy is not what you’re here for. But furthermore, the film gets so much right in regard to tone and cinematic fidelity that fudging the dates of some of this stuff is more than acceptable. It frees the movie up to be less about that specific era of filmmaking and more of a broad love letter to everything from the medium’s earliest days all the way up to the atomic science-fiction heyday of the ‘50s.

This results in some delirious highs, one of which is the film’s climax, which sees it blending a whole host of influences into absolute madcap lunacy. It’s King Kong meets The Blob meets Plan 9 From Outer Space, all starring the Minions, and it’s honestly kind of surreal.

1. The Most Fun Intro to Cinema Studies Course You’ll Ever Take

Minions & Monsters is a net-positive for humankind. In an age of hypermodernity, in which technology threatens the very fabric of all that creative professionals hold dear, the idea that countless children will flood local multiplexes this weekend and see a film so celebratory of classic cinema is truly heartwarming. This film has entire gags and sequences built off the back of works like Citizen Kane, Modern Times, Steamboat Bill, Jr., The Maltese Falcon, Casablanca, and Wings, and just rolls with it. These are films that the vast majority of modern adults haven’t seen, much less children, and yet Minions & Monsters plays like both an extended love letter to these films and a profound invitation to new audiences, encouraging them to watch them anew.

I’m not saying I expect four-year-olds across the country to come out of this movie begging their parents to rent Citizen Kane for them, but what I am saying is that I think Minions & Monsters could prove to be a phenomenal gateway drug for a whole new generation of young film enthusiasts. And for that alone, I couldn’t help but sit there in awe of the simple fact that something like this even exists, much less as an Illumination film in 2026.

RGM GRADE

(A)

When I was a young boy, I saw Joe Dante’s Looney Tunes: Back in Action with my parents at the theater. Among its many references, that film has a whole extended gag where Bugs Bunny gets put into Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho. This inspired me as a kid to ask my parents what that whole sequence was all about, which led to them telling me about Psycho and Hitchcock as a filmmaker. It’s something I still remember to this day because that experience planted a seed in my brain that would only blossom in the years to come as I turned into a bona fide horror hound and Hitchcock connoisseur. The thought that the kiddos of today are likely about to have similar experiences of their own, with any number of the truly wonderful films featured in Minions & Monsters, is one I found overwhelmingly joyous.

I do not understand for the life of me why Minions & Monsters was allowed to exist; it makes absolutely no sense on paper to make this movie right now. My best guess is that the Minions franchise is simply a big enough IP that longtime creatives Lynch and Coffin were afforded carte blanche and decided to make the most “one for me” film in recent animation history. Whatever the case may be, God bless whoever is responsible for this film seeing the light of day, because it is a genuine life-affirming treat.