There isn't much pretense to Minions & Monsters, and that ends up working in its favor. The plot — something about a cursed relic, a crumbling gothic castle, and Gru's henchmen stumbling into the middle of a decades-old monster feud — exists mostly as an excuse to put yellow chaos agents next to a Dracula type, a Frankenstein's-monster type, and a werewolf who can't quite control the transformation. It knows exactly what kind of movie it is.
What keeps it from feeling like pure brand extension is how committed the film is to the bit. The monster designs are genuinely well done, closer in spirit to the Universal classics than the sanitized versions kids usually get, and the Minions' chaotic slapstick energy actually plays well against that more gothic backdrop instead of clashing with it.
The film's best gag is a full three-minute sequence of a Minion trying to explain a wooden stake to a vampire who keeps interpreting it as a gift.
Kids in the screening laughed early and often, and the film moves fast enough that it never really overstays its welcome at 95 minutes. Adults will find considerably less to hold onto — the jokes rarely aim above the kids in the room, and a subplot about the monsters' own internal politics gets introduced and mostly abandoned.
It's not going to convert anyone who's already tired of this franchise, and it doesn't have a fraction of the wit the best Illumination outings occasionally stumble into. But judged purely as a big, dumb, well-designed piece of monster-mash slapstick for a Wednesday matinee, it does the job.
