monsters & minions
Posted on August 24, 2026 by Escape
I took my kids to the cinema to watch the latest instalment of Minions. The movie was so bland and uninspiring that both my wife and I actually fell asleep.
It genuinely feels like Hollywood has completely lost the ability to make even a decent children’s cartoon.
The story feels like someone took a pile of unfinished sketches, half-baked ideas and random jokes, crumpled them into a ball, and decided to throw everything onto the screen in the hope that something would stick. No coherent narrative just a collection of disconnected bits that someone apparently thought might be funny if placed next to each other.
The characters are no better. The film throws together personalities, visual styles and themes from completely different directions with seemingly no understanding of how to create any kind of synergy between them. It feels less like a carefully designed ensemble and more like a random assortment of characters assembled from whatever happened to be lying around.
The character design deserves a separate rant. At times, I genuinely wondered whether the entire process (from initial concept to finished 3D model) had been generated by AI and then simply approved without a single human being looking at the result. The models are strangely proportioned, visually incoherent and often look as though they belong to completely different movies.
And then there is the animation itself. The quality of the 3D modelling, animation, shading and texturing is surprisingly poor. Some of the materials and surface treatments look completely inappropriate for the objects they are supposed to represent (like the Cthulhu monster, or whatever-this-eyes-shit-was). Staging and lighting are equally horrendous, with shots that often feel flat, cluttered and visually unpleasant.
The soundtrack? I don’t even want to get into it. Completely forgettable and mediocre at best.
What bothers me most is that this isn’t some obscure low-budget production nobody expected much from. This is a major Hollywood animated franchise aimed primarily at children. And yet the whole thing feels strangely careless as if nobody involved gives a shit, or just genuinely incapable of doing so.
I felt a bit uneasy at times sitting in the movie theater full of children that weren’t laughing.
