Minions – Memphis Flyer

Bruce the shark and Roy Schider hit the beach in Steven Spielberg’s Jaws.

With the 2020 summer film season on hold for at least another month, the newly reopened Malco Summer Drive-In is offering classic blockbusters for your socially distant entertainment this Memorial Day weekend.

Screen 3 is where the action is with a Steven Spielberg double feature. The early show is the one that started it all. Before Jaws’ 1975 release, summer was Hollywood’s sleepy season, and Steven Spielberg was directing made-for-TV movies. Jaws set box office records, created a template for the wide-release summer blockbuster, and made Spielberg a household name. Just look at this trailer from 1975, which crackles with tension and danger.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In

The second Spielberg masterpiece is one that brought CGI into the mainstream. 1993’s Jurassic Park broke the box office records that E.T. had set 11 years earlier. Say what you will about Spielberg, the man knows how to cut a trailer.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (2)

On screen 2, another double feature. 2001’s The Fast and the Furious was a frothy street racing exploitation movie with a guy named Vin Diesel (who was clearly born to star in car movies) as a tough guy who couldn’t make cars fly. Yet.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (3)

John Singleton directed the sequel, 2 Fast 2 Furious, in 2003. Just look at that jawline on Paul Walker.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (4)

Over on screen 1, a kids animation double feature with the pandemic’s surprise hit Trolls: World Tour, starring Anna Kendrick and Memphis’ own Justin Timberlake.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (5)

The Trolls are paired with a film that spawned a million memes, 2015’s Minions.

Jaws Leads Classic Summer Film Weekend at the Summer Drive-In (6)

On screen 4, The Invisible Man and The Hunt continue their streaks as two of the only first-runs still in theaters. You can read my review of The Invisible Man here.

Tickets to the drive-in are currently a flat $20 per carload. You can buy tickets in advance to guarantee a spot on the Malco website.

Let’s start with what Minions gets right: It’s a mercifully short 93 minutes long.

But even at that length (which, in my book is about right for a comedy), it still feels padded. The story, such as it is, is patched together out of a disconnected batch of ideas via rote formula straight out of the screenwriting manual Save The Cat!. If you’ve noticed some startling similarities in Hollywood product in the last few years, it’s because the cult of Blake Snyder’s book, which boasts the subtitle The Last Book On Screenwriting You’ll Ever Need, has become ubiquitous among studio producers. When the victory celebrations of Minions Kevin, Bob, and Stuart (all identically voiced by Despicable Me co-director Pierre-Louis Padang Coffin) are interrupted by a sudden and inexplicable re-emergence of vanquished villain Scarlet Overkill (Sandra Bullock), I groaned audibly in the theater. The “false ending” beat is right out of Save The Cat!, and it’s become one of my biggest pet peeves.

I’m not really spoiling anything by telling you about the ending, because Minions is a prequel to Despicable Me, the sleeper hit of 2010 that starred Steve Carell as a sympathetic supervillain named Gru who is assisted in his plot to steal the moon by a pack of strange, Simpsons-yellow blobs with goggles and overalls. The success of the Minions as a pop-culture icon is a tribute to the power of neoteny, the display of traits associated with babies. With their big, goggled eyes, bulbous heads that double as bodies, and pre-vocal gibberish vocabulary, the Minions are essentially abstracted toddlers. Aiming the character design straight at the audience’s mammalian brain has paid off big time for the studio in the form of stuffed doll sales. The one-joke supporting characters got their own vehicle.

Scarlet Overkill and Minions

The joke pays off best during Minions‘ opening sequence, where the little yellow fellers are given a backstory that reaches back into geologic time. Apparently indestructible and immortal, the Minions served T. Rexes, Neanderthals, and Dracula before being forced into hiding in an arctic cave because they got on Napoleon’s bad side during the retreat from Moscow. When three of them finally emerge in 1968 to look for a new villain to serve, they end up at a supervillian’s convention that looks like a rejected sequence from The Incredibles.

The charms of the Despicable Me franchise lie in its subversion of comic book superhero tropes, but nearly everything it does was done better in the 1990s by Ben Edlund’s The Tick. Minions also borrows heavily from The Venture Bros., and if I were the showrunners, I would sue for the blatant lifting of the character design of Scarlet Overkill from Dr. Girlfriend. But in place of brainy jokes about failed heroes and villains that makes The Venture Bros. consistently one of the best shows on television, Minions offers half-assed Three Stooges re-treads, phoned-in performances, and unimaginative animation.

There are two numbers that sum up Minions: The production budget was $75 million, less than half of what Inside Out cost. But, as an unnamed insider leaked to Ad Age, the promotion budget was a whopping $593 million. If you think you’ve been seeing a lot of Minions lately, that’s why. The advertising medium is the message. The film is just an afterthought.