Minions

About the film

Contains story spoilers.

Minions begins long before the yellow characters meet Gru, imagining their need for a villainous master as a habit stretching back to the beginning of life. They enthusiastically serve powerful creatures and historical figures, then repeatedly contribute to their employers’ deaths through incompetence. Isolation eventually leaves the tribe without purpose, prompting Kevin to seek a new leader with Stuart and Bob. The three are not aspiring conquerors so much as helpers whose enthusiasm needs somewhere to go. Kevin tries to organize the mission, Stuart is more easily distracted, and Bob brings a trusting affection represented by the teddy bear he carries. The film turns their apparent lack of judgment into a practical problem: they need to find somebody evil enough to admire and survive being useful to her.

Their search reaches New York in 1968, where an advertisement reveals Villain-Con, a gathering in Orlando for people who make crime into a profession and a public identity. The journey there includes a ride with the Nelson family, whose cheerful domestic appearance conceals a criminal routine. That contrast prepares the Minions for a world in which villains can have fan conventions, family outings and carefully managed reputations. At the convention, Scarlet Overkill selects the trio as henchmen and takes them to London. Her ambition centers on the British crown, combining a desire for power with a childhood fixation on royal status. Herb, her inventor husband, provides elaborate gadgets, turning marriage into a partnership built around carrying out her schemes.

Scarlet orders the Minions to steal the crown and makes failure a threat to their lives. The assignment seems to offer a straightforward way to prove their loyalty, but their attempts to escape pursuit lead Bob to pull a sword from a stone. The act unexpectedly makes him king, giving the most innocent member of the group the authority Scarlet wanted for herself. He has not deliberately betrayed her, and he willingly surrenders the throne when she demands it. Scarlet nevertheless interprets the result through rivalry and humiliation. This misunderstanding drives the rest of the film: the Minions believe they can repair a disappointed employer’s feelings, while their employer regards their accidents as evidence of a plot against her.

Imprisonment does not make them understand how much danger they are in. Herb’s attempt at torture becomes another series of play opportunities, and the trio escapes to apologize at Scarlet’s coronation. Their arrival accidentally drops a chandelier on her, transforming the apology into what looks like an assassination attempt. Villains pursue them through London, and Scarlet captures Stuart and Bob while Kevin tries to find a way to rescue them. The separation gives the group’s usual disorder a sharper purpose. Kevin cannot simply follow a crowd or wait for the others to misunderstand their way out of captivity; he has to seek help through the same inventions and criminal spaces that made Scarlet seem impressive earlier in the journey.

In Herb’s laboratory, Kevin triggers a machine that enlarges him to a gigantic size. The change supplies the force he needs to confront Scarlet, rescue his friends and protect the rest of the tribe when they arrive. Her attack escalates to a missile, which Kevin swallows before being carried upward with Scarlet and Herb. The explosion appears to end his life, allowing the Minions a brief moment of grief before he returns at his normal size. The Queen regains her position and rewards the three according to their personalities: Bob receives a small crown for his bear, Stuart a guitar, and Kevin a knighthood. The rewards make the end of the London adventure a recognition of friendship and rescue rather than successful service to Scarlet’s original plan.

Scarlet and Herb survive and make another attempt to take the crown, but a young Gru stops them with a freeze ray and escapes on a rocket-powered vehicle. The Minions immediately follow, recognizing the sort of ingenious villain they have been looking for. This final encounter connects the prequel to the Despicable Me world without requiring its story to recount the whole relationship that will develop afterward. The mission has exposed the difference between loyalty as obedience and loyalty as care for one another. Kevin’s most important action is not stealing an object for a master but saving the people who trusted him to find one. Gru’s arrival supplies a new destination while the London story has already resolved the immediate threat to the trio and the tribe.

Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda organize much of the comedy around speech that communicates through sound, gesture and context rather than complete English sentences. Coffin’s voices make the Minions’ excitement and panic clear even when the words are invented or borrowed from different languages. Their bodies are equally readable: eyes, mouths, overalls and quick changes of posture let a crowd register a shared reaction almost instantly. The human characters supply a more elaborate1960s world of conventions, fashion, music and theatrical villainy, while the trio keeps misunderstanding its social rules. Scarlet’s need to be admired makes those misunderstandings especially dangerous. The film’s comic engine is therefore a mismatch between enthusiastic helpers and an employer who assumes that every outcome must reflect somebody’s intention, even when an accident is the simplest explanation.