Confused waste of potential

Rating: 3/10 (4 September 2013)

I enjoyed the first Despicable Me quite a bit. Especially the minions were great fun. This is one reason I was really disappointed after finishing DM 2.
The film had almost no plot to speak of. There was no tension or excitement at any point. If there was an issue, it was resolved within minutes or even seconds. None of the characters went through any sort of gradual personality change. The ones that did change did so from one scene to the next, often with no explanation or a only single line to let you know why.
The first minutes offered several laughs and chuckles. After that, I may have smiled slightly four times. I did consider leaving the cinema twice, and I noticed about 15 people who did so. Most jokes fell flat and were overplayed, overused, embarrassing and annoying. Lucy was clearly supposed to be found annoying by Gru, but she was also unbearably cringe-worthy to the audience at all times. The minions constituted more than half of all the "funny moments" in the story and surprisingly failed completely. It was if they had brain stormed "funny minion costumes" and "100 stupid situations minions can get themselves into" and then just selected them at random to plop into the film now and then. I don't know how they are going to do a Minion film now that we have already been bombarded with unfunny repetitive sketches throughout all of DM 2. All I know is I will not watch it.
The animation was quite good. It was smooth and at times fairly pretty. Some characters and animals were designed in a pleasingly humorous way while others were exaggerated to the point of being silly and aggravating.
Overall the story was a mess with no direction, no excitement and mostly shallow, irritating characters. It was a weak foundation for many tired attempts at squeezing out the last cuteness and comicality of the minions.