87 min | PG | July 1, 2022 | Universal Pictures
A young Gru idolizes a supervillain crew called the Vicious 6 and schemes his way into their world. His Minions stumble after him in a 1970s San Francisco built out of disco and kung fu. The franchise has found its formula and refuses to do anything else with it.
Gru is eleven years old and wants one thing. He wants to join the Vicious 6, the supervillain team that just ousted its founder. He bungles the audition and steals from them instead. Director Kyle Balda turns this into a 1970s chase comedy where a child and a swarm of yellow creatures run from professional criminals. The film is a prequel engine. It exists to show how the small ambitions of a kid become the larger ambitions of the man.
Steve Carell voices young Gru with the same clipped accent and the same wounded confidence he brings to the older version. The child reads as a smaller draft of the adult. Alan Arkin plays Wild Knuckles, the deposed villain, with a tired wit that gives the film its only real adult texture. Taraji P. Henson voices Belle Bottom as a strutting boss who treats villainy as performance. Pierre Coffin voices the Minions in his usual gibberish, and the film leans on three of them by name to carry whole sequences. Michelle Yeoh appears as Master Chow and trains a Minion in kung fu, which is exactly the kind of detour the movie reaches for.
Balda directs from a script by Matthew Fogel that strings together set pieces with thin connective tissue. The production design does the heaviest lifting. San Francisco is rendered in burnt orange and brown, with wide collars and shag carpet and a soundtrack of period funk and soul covers. The animation keeps the Minions in constant slapstick motion, and the editing cuts on physical gags rather than story beats. The 1970s styling is the most committed idea in the film, and it is decoration rather than substance.
This is a machine that produces Minion gags on schedule. The jokes land in the way a vending machine dispenses a soda. You press the button and you get the thing. The film never asks why Gru becomes a villain or what the Minions want, because those questions would slow the slapstick. It moves fast, stays loud, and forgets itself the moment it ends.