Anyone who has always wondered why the Minions look the way they do will get a pretty enlightening answer in their new film: a couple of super villains are chasing the title heroes, who are always a bit reminiscent of pills with glasses, or the yellow ones Surprise egg capsules. It’s the streets of San Francisco – and that’s where their form comes into their own: the Minions drop and roll down the steep streets at breakneck speed, out of reach of their pursuers. In general, the yellow fun bombs often have simple answers to complicated questions, which is probably what accounts for their popularity: because wouldn’t we all prefer simple solutions? A simpler life? And don’t we all want to let ourselves go – like with karacho, like in San Francisco?
The former hippie metropolis is now an overpriced dormitory town for computer nerds, which is why the computer nerds from Illumination Entertainment moved the latest Minions adventure to the 1970s. That’s where eleven-year-old Gru ends up, whom viewers only knew as Gru as an adult. But he already had villain ambitions as a child. The would-be villain was first seen in 2010 in the hit movie “Despicable Me”, even then the chaotic minions with their blue dungarees, welding goggles and their nonsense language were always at his side. At that time they still played the sidekick role, but they were so popular with the public (and were so well marketed) that their performances continued to expand. In 2015 they got their own movie. He became even more successful than the “Despicable Me” seriesso now the sequel (which has been postponed several times because of the pandemic) follows, with a childish greeting, new super villains and a nasty hippie grandpa, who can be quite nice in the end.
The Minions’ humor relies on the visual, on chaos and anarchy like the comedies of the silent film era
There are many pop culture references, to the great white shark, to James Bond or to the James Bond parody “Austin Powers”. But the focus is on the minions, they’re gaga as ever, wonderfully irreverent and uninhibitedly infantile. Her humor is direct and almost without words: almost like in the slapstick comedies of the silent film era, in which comedy was reduced to the visual, in which chaos and anarchy were relied on – and always left a path of destruction in their wake. It’s a pure form of physical comedy, even if in this case it’s yellow capsules with eyes and dungarees that are hit, pushed or mauled. In the plane’s cockpit, two-eyed Kevin jerks the plane up so wildly that his buddy, one-eyed Stuart, gets stuck in the toilet. For this, Stuart practices the breaking test on the board with Kevin’s head for an extra long time during kung fu training.
And then the Minions sing the most beautiful cover version of one Rolling StonesSongs that even Mick Jagger would have tears in his eyes: “You can’t always get what you want”. You can find that stupid or hilarious, but in the end these yellow anarchists get everyone they want: the young, the old – and everyone in between too. The joke is simple, but cross-generational. At a time when humor has long since become a political issue, when many gags are no longer made and when even experienced comedians despair of political correctness, the Minions just keep going. And when that’s not enough, they drop and roll through the streets of San Francisco.
Minions: The Rise of Gru, USA 2022 – Director: Kyle Balda. With the voices of: Steve Carell, Alan Arkin (English original), Oliver Rohrbeck, Thomas Gottschalk (German version), Universal Pictures, 87 minutes. Theatrical release: June 30, 2022.