The main three were pseudo-characters in the 2015 Minions film. And of course, what would Gru be without the Minions in his basement, hundreds of whom appear on screen, but four of whom are the actual focus. Sometime later, we’re reintroduced to little Gru (a pitch-shifted Steve Carell), whose dreams of supervillainy get him laughed at by his classmates (if you think this embarrassment might inform his story, think again). He’s the closest thing the movie has to an actual character, since his five former teammates mostly melt into the background as an indecipherable blob (a handful of funny gags aside). Rounding out the crew is Alan Arkin’s Wild Knuckles, an aged martial artist who gets booted from the team as soon as he helps them steal an ancient pendant. Henson’s Belle Bottom, whose abilities aren’t quite clear, but there’s also Svengeance, a Mad Max-style roller-skater voiced by Dolph Lundgren, Danny Trejo as the metal-handed Stronghold, and the two most amusingly conceived villains in the group, Lucy Lawless as Nunchucks (a nunchuck-wielding nun), and Jean-Clawed, a Frenchman with an enormous lobster claw, voiced by none other than Jean-Claude Van Damme. The prologue gives us a fun look at a group of baddies, the Vicious 6, as they steal an ancient artifact. Minions: The Rise of Gru is ultimately inoffensive, but children deserve a little better than a flurry of random images that feel barely connected. Am I thinking too hard about this? Absolutely, but it’s difficult not to in a year that gave us the Pixar instant-classic Turning Red. Their millennial parents? Maybe, but the film’s 1970s setting leads to a flood of period-specific allusions aimed at Boomers and Gen X’ers. Wrapped up in all this is the question of who this movie is for, if the Minions rose to prominence over a decade ago? The teens who were children during the first Despicable Me? Probably not. The Minions, with their speech comprising made-up French, bits of English and Spanish, and near-total gibberish, are the kind of babbling caricatures used to entertain babies, yet they’ve taken on a life of their own on social media, as digital stationery for wine aunts and weird uncles to type up harmless mundanities (“Exercise? I thought you said extra fries!”) The Despicable Me series has an entire history behind it (or rather, ahead of it The Rise of Gru is a prequel), so it must serve a narrative function, and as a movie, it technically has a story and characters, but they all exist in service of slapstick gags that may as well be isolated vignettes. It would be a fool’s errand to judge a Minions movie on anything except its own terms, but figuring out what those terms even are is a challenge.
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