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Feb 25, 2024 Full Review Wesley Lovell Cinema Sight Apart from the notion of individuality and discrediting age as a barrier to success, Minions: The Rise of Gru rides entirely on the fumes of its ...
Jul 1, 2022 · Tweet. Now streaming on: Powered by JustWatch. “Minions: The Rise of Gru” takes place in 1976. Had I seen it that year, I would have laughed my six-year-old self silly and demanded to see it again and again. Alas, I’m not six years old anymore. My sense of humor, on the other hand, still hovers around that age.
Jun 30, 2022 · Kids love them. Parents, as far as one can see, tolerate them. Their latest outing, directed by Kyle Balda, Brad Abelson and Jonathan Del Val, is “Minions: The Rise of Gru,” in which the ...
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- Even for a kids’ movie, it’s a mess.
- What's the best Despicable Me movie?
- Verdict
By Siddhant Adlakha
Posted: Jun 30, 2022 2:00 pm
Minions: The Rise of Gru hits theaters on July 1, 2022.
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. 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.
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. Little kids today? Perhaps. 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. 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. Minions: The Rise of Gru is ultimately inoffensive, but children deserve a little better than a flurry of random images that feel barely connected.
The prologue gives us a fun look at a group of baddies, the Vicious 6, as they steal an ancient artifact. There’s Taraji P. 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. 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. 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).
Minions: The Rise of Gru is more Minion compilation than Gru prequel. It wastes its fun ideas and comedic setups in favor of disconnected slapstick gags, which may delight the diaper-wearing crowd, but will end up a chore to anyone forced to comprehend its inert dramatic scenes and ’70s pop culture references.
- Siddhant Adlakha
Jun 14, 2022 · ‘Minions: The Rise of Gru’ Review: The Twinkie-Shaped Horde Picks Sides in This Delightfully Silly Sequel Reviewed at Annecy Animation Festival (opener), June 13, 2022. MPA Rating: PG.
Jun 29, 2022 · Rated PG, 1 hour 27 minutes. Set in 1976 California, the film is an origin story depicting how Gru ( Steve Carell) became allied with the diminutive yellow creatures (all voiced hilariously by ...
A fun treat for the whole family, “Minions: the Rise of Gru” is another in a string of successful and well made animated films starring these Twinkie-looking oddities and their hook-nosed leader.
