Too Many Bananas

Rating: 7/10 (8 July 2015)

There is a conscious effort to generate chuckles in MINIONS, the spin off of the blockbuster animation, Despicable Me. This isn't necessarily a bad thing, nor one that could have been easily shrugged off, but its inevitable persistence, somehow tones down the ingenuity of the bean-shaped yellow cuties, in their first solo (almost) Gru-less outing. In Despicable Me, the heart of the narrative runs on Gru's relationship with three little cute girls, providing heart and soul amid of the massive comic effort delivered to draw brittle laughter from the audience. Such thing is seemingly missing in MINIONS. In their original movies, they couldn't care less whether we're attentive or not of their silly, almost always stupid but laughable choices, but here, they are already working hard to please us, which is somehow distracting, but still never less of a massive entertainment.
The Minions are dedicated henchmen which, even at the dawn of time, are already on the hunt for the evil master they intend to serve, forever. They've gone dedicating their service from a T-rex to the likes of Dracula, and Napoleon, but their very own clumsiness keeps sending their masters to their death. Finally, they brave the harsh coldness of Antartica to settle down, and a civilization of their own, starts thriving for their own keeping. The feat is a moment they would want to remain in forever, but again, without a villainous leader to guide them, there seems no point in going on. Soon enough, the once flourishing minion-isque realm hits a point of stagnation, and nobody could care less of bringing the life back...except the courageous Kevin. With the shy Bob and perpetually screwing (doesn't necessarily mean the other two are any less) Stuart, Kevin embarks on a quest, intending to find the most heinous of all supervillains. That quest leads them to the Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock)in Orlando, and later on for the rest of the movie, in 1968 London. As a villain, she's deadly and ambitious, a combo that would inspire the three to dedicate their full service to her, but both hold dangers of immeasurable scale, for their own safety.
The relentless deployment of slapstick comedy, comes in brimmingly overwhelming amounts, that even most of them don't actually hit their targets, those still-many that landed, are more than enough to make us chuckle. Such abundance comes across as overkill as Scarlet's last name, and at some moments, it fleets with turn out of rudimentary importance, but the laughter generated, no matter how ephemeral, makes up for the narrative mess.
The string of misfortunes of the three, on their way to finding their "One" evil master (No, it isn't Overkill), packs a different wallop from the lighthearted emotional sentiments imbued in Despicable Me, and keeps everything running on one lane, desperately pushing efforts to arrive to the point of unnecessariness of its forced efforts to send the edges of our lips to those of our ears. The intention is unwittedly effective, but lingers for too short of a moment, to make us forget what these ridiculous yellow beanies are seemingly up to. It also doesn't add up that Scarlet Overkill is too small to inspire terror in comparison with the colossal allure of the disreputably criminal mastermind Gru. This make paying these little creatures and the story they're into with lingering attention, not easy, but the affection is earned, and their reward is the uncreatively witty one word: "BANANA".