The film isn’t even over yet and, sitting amongst only three other people in this screening of Minions V Monsters, I find myself far too easily distracted.

The Minions franchise has been delivering diminishing returns for some time, but this may be its weakest outing yet.

I am fully aware that, as a 33-year-old, I am not the target audience. However, the best family films work because they respect every member of the audience. Previous entries at least expanded the world, developed the characters, or delivered enough absurd humour to justify the chaos.

Here, we are left with bland storytelling buried beneath an embarrassing amount of exposition, almost as if the film does not trust itself to communicate visually. Familiar plot beats from previous Despicable Me and Minions films are dragged out once again, making the whole thing feel painfully predictable.

The biggest problem, however, is how little the film commits to its own concept. For a movie called Minions V Monsters, the monsters themselves are surprisingly absent until late in the story, and even when they do arrive, they feel less like essential characters and more like a contractual obligation.

Rather than embracing the ridiculous possibilities of monster movie chaos, the film retreats into the familiar franchise formula: the Minions searching for someone bigger and badder to follow. It was a tired idea years ago, and adding fangs and fur does little to disguise how little has changed.

Children will no doubt still enjoy watching the little yellow, denim-wearing characters bounce around causing mayhem, and the film will almost certainly make enough money to continue the franchise. But popularity should not remove the need for imagination.

The final reveal, that the entire adventure has been a film created by the Minions themselves, only reinforces the problem. Instead of being a clever twist, it feels like an attempt to explain away why so little of what happened mattered.

Perhaps the most frustrating part is that the credits are genuinely funny. Those brief moments of chaotic visual comedy are a reminder of what made the Minions work in the first place: simple setups, ridiculous outcomes, and an understanding that sometimes less story is more.

Even more frustratingly, the film seems to finally find itself when it is already over. The credit scenes lean into the familiar warmth of the Despicable Me universe, using the monster-conjuring book to create the kind of playful chaos this premise promised from the beginning.

It feels charming, silly, and strangely comforting. In those brief moments, the film remembers why audiences fell in love with these characters in the first place.

Unfortunately, it also left me with one unavoidable thought:

This should have been the film.