Review | “Minions: The Rise of Gru” Symbolizes Everything Wrong with Bad Animated Movies
This is the review I wrote opening weekend for “Minions: The Rise of Gru”.
Animation is a beautiful art form that can be used to craft emotional, operatic, and personal stories that define the medium for generations.
And what does Illumination do with it?
Pump out meaningless garbage devoid of any artistic integrity that only exists to make money.
“Minions: The Rise of Gru” is the epitome of pointless and corporate, churned out from the worst big budget animation studio working today with no vision or emotional soul. It’s actually as bad as the first “Minions” movie in all honesty. This is one of the worst animated movies I’ve seen in forever and it’s even worse than “Hotel Transylvania: Transformania” from this year as well, making it the worst film of the year that I’ve seen up to this point.
Great job, guys.
The story of “Rise of Gru” is completely nonexistent. There’s no theme, no character arc, not meaningful message or development of ANY KIND. Just a bunch of thinly strewn together plots that aren’t engaging, witty, or funny in the slightest. Did I mention the movie isn’t funny, because it REALLY ISN’T. I did not laugh once during the entire thing. The jokes get very old and aren’t even original. Most of the humor is either the minions doing something stupid or Gru saying something stupid, and it gets old incredibly quickly.
All the characters are insufferable because either they don’t have any meaningful depth or are insanely dumb. The Vicious 6 make Zurg from Lightyear look like Darth Vader in terms of compelling villains. They’re so idiotically stupid and bland, I could not STAND them. The plot goes into motion because they just can’t help from showing Gru the stupid necklace for NO REASON and Gru takes it out of sheer convenience of having the right sticky gun. It’s mind-boggling.
And then we come to the minions. I cannot emphasize how much damage these stupid yellow tic-tacs have inflicted on Illumination’s way of making movies. The first “Despicable Me” was fine enough, but everyone took a liking to the minions and Illumination started adopting the same clean and audience tested animation style into all of their future projects and I cannot stand it.
The minions have NO CHARACTER OR ANY MEANINGFUL TRAITS. They’re just there to sell more merchandise and put me in a bad mood. They are everything wrong with this movie and this entire franchise, and I do desperately want to move on from them.
“Minions: The Rise of Gru” is an empty and meaningless experience that I hated watching and never want to watch again. Don’t give me the “calm down bro it’s just for kids” nonsense. Animated movies can be more than “just for kids”. Besides, kids deserve better than whatever the hell this was. Not Steve Carrel or even Michelle Yeoh can save this dumpster fire. Worst film of the year.
Grade: F
