Sandra Bullock, Jon Hamm and Steve Coogan lend their voices to this Despicable Me spin-off but, of course, it’s the zany, goggle-wearing yellow Minions that are the scene-stealing stars of the show.
Scene-stealing sidekicks in the Despicable Me movies, those zany goggle-wearing yellow Minions get their own animated adventure and prove just as kookily cute and funny as on their previous outings.
We first got to know them as the blindly devoted lackeys of Steve Carell’s supervillain Gru, and it turns out that the Minions have been in the henchmen game for millennia, attaching themselves to the biggest, baddest, most despicable master of any given era, from Tyrannosaurus Rex to Napoleon.
The minions are singularly inept, however, in keeping their evil bosses in business (the T-Rex goes over a cliff and into fiery lava thanks to their bungling) and they find themselves languishing in icy exile until a trio of plucky Minions set forth to find a new leader to follow.
Following escapades in 1968 New York and Florida, the threesome gets hired by haughty, wasp-waisted baddie Scarlet Overkill (voiced by Sandra Bullock), who takes them to London in the Swinging Sixties to steal the Queen of England’s crown. The Minions’ subsequent adventures don’t stretch the Despicable Me formula particularly far, but there’s still something irresistibly comic about their slapstick pratfalls, the macaronic gibberish they spout and above all, their blithely bumbling innocence.
Minions runtime 91 mins. Directors: Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda.
You can stream Minions on Apple TV Plus and Sky TV (UK), rent the movie on Amazon or YouTube Movies or buy the Blu-ray/DVD.
Blu-ray and DVD extras include:
- Jingle Bells Minion Style
- Mini-Movies: Cro Minion
- Competition
- Binky Nelson Unpacified
- Blu-ray only extras: Around The World Interactive Map, Behind The Goggles: The Illumination Story Of The Minions
