From “Sunset Boulevard” to “The Artist,” “Singin’ in the Rain” to “Babylon,” Hollywood’s transition to sound cinema has long been a fertile period for later film artists to recreate with all the more evolved tools at their disposal — and so it proves, most happily and improbably, for the Minions. The frenetic antics of Illumination‘s mascot army of yellow miscreants have always been indebted to vintage slapstick. So in the creatures’ third collective solo feature, director, writer and voice artist Pierre Coffin makes that influence official, explicitly referencing the likes of Buster Keaton, Charlie Chaplin and Harold Lloyd in an adventure that quite logically see the Minions become silent comedy stars — “logically,” of course, being a relative term in this antic story universe — only for their trademark gibberish speaking style to ruin the dream.
The result — for whatever it’s worth to steadfast fans of this 19-year-old and entirely critic-proof series, or indeed target audience members who weren’t remotely alive when 2015’s “Minions” came out — is a clear peak for the series: a Minions movie with an actual idea at its core beyond general cheerful chaos, and proof that the pill-shaped devils are served better as stars than as sidekicks. 2022’s “Minions: The Rise of Gru” once more anchored them to their old “Despicable Me” overlord, and felt like a step backwards; they’re most interesting when they swarm the screen to the exclusion of all else, like an eleventh plague so unholy that the Bible didn’t list it. The new film delivers grandly on that front: Small children will be cackling and incoherently quoting the film for weeks, and their parents might even chuckle at the reminder.
