Starring: Pierre Coffin, Trey Parker, Allison Janney, Christoph Waltz, Jesse Eisenberg, Jeff Bridges, Zoey Deutch, Bobby Moynihan, and Phil LaMarr.

Directed by Pierre Coffin

Universal, out now

At a film history museum, a guide (Allison Janney) tells the story of the two people who changed cinema forever: James and Henry, the Minions?!

If you’re a longstanding fan of the series this one is set cleverly to the side of everything we’ve seen before. A different tribe of Minions travel the world looking for their Big Boss, and find him. More than once actually. We see them work for an enormous cyclops in Ancient Greece and a wizard in what might be Italy. Both times it goes really well until, very suddenly, it doesn’t. The series’ fondness for mayhem leaves no physical joke behind, starting with a truly extraordinary stepping on Lego bit and never really stopping. The Minions’ Hollywood career starts with a glorious sprint through the classic images of silent cinema. Buster Keaton? Check. Charlie Chaplin? Check. Harold Lloyd hanging from that clockface? Check. It flows into Babylon-esque excess, a really very sweet explanation for their uniform and out into the one nemesis they can never defeat: the talkies.

The gear shift following that is weirdly ambitious for the second movie in a sidequel series, and splits the main Minions. James, Edward and Henry travel with Goomi (a legally distinct tentacled monster voiced with massive squeaky aplomb by Trey Parker) to get some monsters for their movie while Dick leads the rest of the tribe into working with Dort (Jesse Eisenberg). Dort is a parody of Gort from The Day The Earth Stood Still and he is by some distance the most fun Jesse Eisenberg has ever been. His romance with Debbie (Zoey Deutch also on top form) is adorable and honestly, more fun than the Monster plot.

The Monster plot is also very fun to be fair. We get good cameos from Christoph Waltz as a movie director and Jeff Bridges as twin movie moguls as well as Bobby Moynihan and Phil LaMarr as the two monsters Goomi recruits. but it doesn’t quite gel for me. Maybe it’s the subtle Lovecraft nod. Maybe it’s the fact James, Edward and Henry don’t recognise a Big Boss when they see them. Maybe it’s just Dort is so sweet, and rubbish, he steals the movie.

Regardless, the two plots come back together for a colossal action sequence that actually lands everything we’ve seen and breaks the fourth wall in a way that’s oddly sincere and sweet. The movie closes with a real sense of celebration to it, somehow turning the fifth movie in the series into an exuberant celebration of telling big cool stories where things blow up.

Verdict: If you already liked the series, this is a really good time. If you’ve never seen them before, honestly this is a great cross section of why they’re fun and has the best George Lucas cameo you’ll ever see. Weird and sweet and oddly lovely. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart