Film Review: Minions: The Rise of Gru finds the mascots running out of road
Minions: The Rise of Gru
★★★☆☆
Some questions aren’t worth answering, and some aren’t even worth asking. And then there’s the one that asks how Gru became a supervillain with a horde of Minions at his beck-and-call.
To be fair, (G) does exactly what it says on the tin, following the 11-year-old Gru (voiced by Steve Carrell), ‘a tubby little punk’ but already a precocious mischief-maker, as he ascends through the ranks of supervillainy.
Waiting at the pinnacle are the Vicious 6, a gang led by arch-villain Belle Bottom (Taraji P. Henson) and which includes such ne’er-do-wells as Jean-Clawed (Jean-Claude van Damme), Svengeance (Dolph Lundgren) and Nun-Chuck (Lucy Lawless), a martial arts expert who is also a nun.
When the Vicious 6 bump off their leader Wild Knuckles (Alan Arkin), Gru spots an opportunity for infamy designed to impress his future peers. Alas for Gru, his stealing of the all-powerful Zodiac Stone puts him on a collision course with Knuckles and the Vicious 6…
But what of the Minions, I hear you cry.
Well, the banana-coloured, pint-sized Igors — all voiced by Pierre Coffin — remain a hapless rabble babbling away in a kind of hiccupy Spanglish as they try to help Gru achieve his ambitions, and they’re every bit as charmingly bonkers as ever.
The setting of the early ’70s provides plenty of opportunities for period-specific gags, but once we’ve negotiated the opening credits (a funky tribute to ’70s-era movies) and the first scene (the latest parody of the tomb-plundering sequence in ), the story settles down to a predictable yarn occasionally enlivened by an outbreak of Minion-inspired mayhem.
Very young viewers will probably revel in the anarchy and -style slapstick, but their older chaperones may well feel that the movies are rapidly running out of road.
(cinema release)
