In the beginning, millennia ago, a strange yellow organism comes out of the ocean. The species quickly becomes attracted to the most cruel life forms, but because of their stupidity, they keep causing the premature deaths of their idols. Rejected and resigned to their fate, they finally retire to an icy world where life begins to lose meaning. But Kevin won’t give up. He decides to go on a mission to find a new bad guy they can all cling to and get back their purpose in life. Accompanied by Stuart and Bob, they set off in the 1960s, ending up in New York, where they try to win the heart of the ambitious Scarlet Overkill, the first super-villain…

Picture gallery

Minions is the best example of the current downward slide of big-budget animated movies, which have become an overstuffed and cynical commodity. In the wake of the exceptional success of the two Despicable Me movies, the minions were transformed into marketing stars, and Illumination Entertainment and Universal have completed the process by giving them their own origin story. The result is visual junk food made up of two-joke punch lines based on ponderous musical numbers and the language of the little yellow Gremlins – an obvious attempt to cash in on a phenomena that would have been better served by more intelligence, or at least any intelligence at all. But Pierre Coffin and Kyle Balda forge ahead, taking out the heavy artillery in the form of endless action and secondary plot lines that are dumber than the Minions themselves. We should be grateful that the people behind Ice Age never put Scrat in a feature film.