A movie series has to be really careful when it makes its comic relief the main characters of a film because most of the time when a movie attempts to do this, it usually badly backfires. One notable example was Pixar's "Cars 2." It tried to make the comic relief Mater the main character and it really badly backfired. Now Illumination is giving the Minions from the highly entertaining "Despicable Me" series their own film and sadly it doesn't work either. It's not awful, but I didn't particularly enjoy it. I don't exactly know what went wrong here, but I'll try my best to say what happened.
The film did start off with promise. It started with a highly entertaining showing the troubled history of the Minions trying to have a particular evil boss and failing. They kill off every master they come across, including a T-Rex, a caveman, the ancient Egyptians, Dracula, even Napoleon. Eventually, the Minions decide to isolate themselves in Antarctica and start living a happy life down at the bottom of the world. Years go by, and the Minions get depressed. However, three brave Minions named Kevin, Bob and Stuart start feeling that they should have a boss and decide to leave the freezing climates and head North. They eventually end up in 1968 New York City and start to look for a boss. They eventually come across an ad for the evilest villain in the world at the time, Scarlett Overkill (Sandra Bullock) and head to Orlando to work for her. They eventually get chosen and Overkill and her husband Herb (Jon Hamm) reveals her next evil scheme which is to try to steal the crown of Queen Elizabeth (Jennifer Saunders) and the rest of the movie is basically indescribable chaos.
The biggest problem with the movie is the fact that the movie is not very funny. Don't get me wrong though, the movie does have humorous moments including the aforementioned opening scene and a pretty hilarious scene involving a crazy family played humorously by Michael Keaton and Allison Janney. Aside from those two moments, I was hoping something funny would occur, but nothing really made me laugh. This is where I realized that the movie was lacking something. It was lacking the other characters that made the "Despicable Me" series work. It needed characters like Gru, Dr. Nefario, Lucy, the girls, Gru's mother. The newer characters just weren't that funny or interesting. I also thought Scarlet Overkill wasn't that evil especially with her extremely weak crime that she's committing. The film doesn't even really have that much of a story. I honestly don't know what it was going for and felt like it was just there to make jokes which were the most likely reason.
"Minions" was a real disappointment. It has some humorous moments, but not a lot of them. It just doesn't really have the charm that the "Despicable Me" movies were so good at capturing. It's honestly a harmless waste of time for very young kids, but it's certainly not something for the whole family.
