Review: Minions & Monsters (2026)

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I didn’t expect the latest Minions movie to be the warmest love letter to old movies in the form of children’s entertainment since Martin Scorsese’s Hugo (2011). But a good part of Minions & Monsters is about the Minions going to old Hollywood and becoming comedy stars. In something of a parody of Singin’ in the Rain (1952), we also see them try to navigate the transition to sound. To be sure, Minions & Monsters lacks the deep historical view of Hugo, which wonderfully captured a specific place (Paris) and time (the 1930s, between the Wars). Instead, this movie, produced by Universal and Illumination and marketed as “Minions meet Universal Horror Monsters,” takes on a strange “all old movies” vibe, seemingly conflating everything from silent comedy to 1930s horror to 1950s space invader movies. Likewise, we get a scattershot mix of movie and horror references, cameos (the best being George Lucas!), and historical stereotypes. (The most oddly placed stereotype is that the character Debbie, voiced by Zoey Deutch, is a suffragette, apparently for no more reason than that’s what women did in the 1920s, right? Wrong, in the sense that the 19th Amendment to the US Constitution was ratified in 1920.) The result might be a conflated and largely surface-level view of the old movie days amidst funny jokes and gags, but it still captures something of the Hollywood story and the joy of creating movies.

I’m also partial to the Minions humour—slapstick with weird voices (the primary Minions are voiced by the French director and animator, Pierre Coffin). And we get a lot of fun human characters voiced by big actors, with Christoph Waltz being my favourite as a film director character. While I haven’t loved the Despicable Me movies, I did like Minions (2015) better than I expected, because it was a cartoon, plain and simple. Let the little yellow pylons cook up some mayhem! The Minions movies also know their place in cartoon history. There’s something so French about the humour, at times, especially in the film’s historical beginning—depicting the Minion migration over the centuries to find an evil villain master, with everyone from the Cyclops to a French king not sufficing—with touches of Asterix and other Continental comic books thrown in. Also, in the moments of ruthless violence I recall Looney Tunes. In fact, Minions are more ruthless than most Looney Tunes cartoons are today.

What Minions & Monsters lacks is a good narrative to tie together the disparate parts. This is where Pixar still trumps Illumination. There’s a story idea—Minions making movies—there’s meta-humour (showing how Digger thinks it’s way smarter than it is, when the ending of this movie is basically the meta-twist revealed half an hour into Iñárritu’s tome). But the narrative never drives the movie.

What else is there to say?

I had hoped to see a classic Universal Horror movie with Minions. I got something both more and less than that. The less isn’t noteworthy, and certainly no worse than the average animated kids flick these days. The more—well, there’s enough here to hopefully breath on the embers of curiosity in film history in a few children. That’s not nothing. Anytime a movie says, “Go see old movies,” even if it’s alongside bum jokes and giant blob aliens, I’m game.

6 out of 10

Minions & Monsters (2026, USA)

Directed by Pierre Coffin; screenplay by Brian Lynch and Pierre Coffin; starring Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, Phil LaMarr.

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