★★★1/2 And yes, the Minions are back. And yes, there is a lot that we already know, a lot of predictable gags, a lot of music from the seventies, more or less like in the first one. Not everything is funny and the story of how Gru makes friends and achieves his vocation as a villain (Gru is a beautiful character, let’s say everything) is not far from the conventions of the genre. But friends: there are gags and very, very funny moments, worthy of classic cartoon royalty (that art that this writer has been trying to claim for years and that makes you laugh out loud, even if you don’t say so). The banana bugs star in all kinds of humor, especially slapstick (blow and blow, falls, etc.) with some minimal mischief. What matters the same is not so much the story or the design -which at this point in the soirée does not generate much of a surprise: everything is brilliant to the point of tedium- but rather that which makes anything good: timing. The animators of the Minions fully understand that a scream or an ass in the air are not funny per se but because of how the gag is presented. The great weakness, beyond a multi-star cast in the original voices (well, we already know: most will see it in the strong Spanish dubbing), consists in that, being pure gag that sometimes covers the story, and that, when the story returns, becomes trivial wait for the next gag. But in times when sadness wins us, something that makes us laugh with the innocence of childhood is something to be thankful for.
