ierre Coffin now gets the top billing (he also serves as the director again), which isn’t bad for a guy whose voice is used solely for moderately intelligible gibberish. There are indeed other roles, but they all notably take a backseat to Coffin’s roly-poly leads, who provide a wide range of attitudes, even if their deliveries are basically all the same. Here, teacher-cum-tour-guide Olivia H. (Allison Janney, who played a different character in the original “Minions” flick) details a Magic of Hollywood exhibit, before chronicling the lives of two of the most important figures in moviedom, legends who shaped the very way that features were made: James and Henry. “Without them, there would be no Hollywood.”

Their story is epic, beginning as all tales about Minions do. Throughout all of time, Minions have been searching for villains to serve, unwaveringly seeking out the evilest masters they can find. But Henry and James don’t always take their inherent goal seriously, focusing instead on troublemaking and lollygagging, contributing markedly to the comical failures of their tribe’s attempts at acquiring a wicked leader. As a result, they’re frequently blamed and banished, cycling between working for a cyclops, a wizard, a mummy, a pirate captain, and more, before they end up in Los Angeles, where they accidentally gain employment at Bright Brothers Pictures, under the direction of the learned Max (the unmistakable Christoph Waltz). “You’ve ruined everything!”

Overflowing with references to – and parodies of – classic films, chaos ensues, placing the Minions in the midst of an impressive amount of Tinseltown history – a brief lesson, of sorts, on the transition from silent pictures to talkies, with a cartoonish representation of the industry and the era. The sickly, jaundiced “children” aren’t unusual enough in this arena, receiving limited attention until they inadvertently become movie stars, which helps them remain rather charming, fitting in with the exaggerated shapes of supporting personas. Once again, the character designs are one of the highlights; they may not be revolutionary, but they’re cute and creative, offering up a decent assortment of offbeat people and monsters to supplement the slapstick antics of the spherocylindrical, suspendered subordinates.

Ups and downs in the Minions’ careers arise, yet the spongy amber capsules are essentially indestructible entities, which means that adversities are trivial at best. They don’t even require food, or sleep, or air to breathe. Viewers may wonder if they’re ever in mortal danger, considering that when they plot to make a monster movie for their big Hollywood comeback, the Lovecraftian monstrosities they conjure threaten to eat or destroy all of humankind, which excludes, of course, any of the Minions from encountering physical harm. The visuals of this backfiring epiphany are the best part, however; crossing elements from “The Day the Earth Stood Still” with “The Blob” generates a surprisingly action-packed finale, full of Harryhausen-esque military showdowns and adventurous confrontations.

Unfortunately, the comedy is noticeably juvenile (save for a rather spot-on Dick joke – the name of one of the Minions), relying on commonplace gags and minor laughs, while also allowing the story to meander with a puzzling women’s suffrage romance subplot (adding the unnecessary voice-casting of Jesse Eisenberg and Zoey Deutch) that likely won’t amuse youthful audiences. But its obvious appeal is the excessive cosplaying by the clumsy yellow runts, along with their incessant babbling and squash-and-stretch mischievousness. In the end, this movie-within-a-movie doesn’t add much to the series, especially since it’s a standalone premise that doesn’t tie in Gru and his dependable despicableness, but it’s not without modest entertainment value and undeniable winsomeness.

– Mike Massie