Despicable Me 2

Rating: 4/10 (5 November 2013)

Judging by the title this must be the follow up to the mildly original animated supervillain flick...by jove it is! Now that first film was cute and reasonably fresh, fresh in the sense that the main character Gru was quite a nice design and voiced nicely by Carell. Also the 'minions' were a neat little invention that did garner the bulk of the giggles and kept the film afloat. The down side was it was yet another superhero/supervillain/super spy parody/spoof type flick which has become a saturated genre.
The big question for me was simply...did we really need this sequel? my answer to that is no. Yeah yeah I know I sound like a Scrooge but come on, really, this film has been so padded out its painful. The plot is so damn linear, supervillain up to no good, someone has to stop him, that someone is Gru. The first film had the neat little twist that the main character was a villain and becomes a goodie, switches sides. This time its just you're bog standard run of the mill superhero/super spy flick.
The problem for me her was nothing really interesting happens, there is nothing to explain, no reason for anything at all. Gru is now a good guy, he's got out of the villain/hero/spy game and he's looking after those sickeningly cute kids which he adopted from the first film. That's it! there is nothing more, did we really need a new film to show us this? oh yeah Gru gets a call to help the 'Anti Villain League' to stop some other villain blah blah blah who cares. The point is none of this was needed, the first film was a reasonably decent quirky animated film that worked well on its own, there was no need to milk it Hollywood sheesh!
What I wanna know is what are these minions exactly? what do they speak? where do they come from? and how many of them are there?! In this film there appears to be like...hundreds n hundreds of em! Yes its just a kids espionage cartoon and its not important as such but its just something I'm curious about.
I mean sure the film looks great as do all animated films these days, but there is just nothing on offer here that warrants the sequel. One or two new characters amongst all the same visual gags, visual action, childish minion tomfoolery, gadgets and general super spy-like jiggery pokery. OK call me a misery but none of it felt worth it to me, it all fell totally flat, lifeless and stale.
One thing I will mention is actually how scary it could be for kids. When those little yellow minions get turned into purple monster zombie minions the film does take a turn to the slightly eerie side. Especially the sequence where one of them is chasing the kids, Jesus its almost like a homage to 'Alien'!
End of the day it doesn't really matter how eye blisteringly good the CGI is, if its all the same stuff trundled out all over again from the first film it will just feel like a cheap merchandise machine to me. The finale isn't too bad and ups the excitement somewhat but it still can't detract from a very anti climatic ending. The very final sequence with the kids right at the end is so disgustingly sickening I virtually gagged...good grief (mental note...its a kids film, its a kids film).
Anyway no originality whatsoever anywhere, but bottom line if you liked the first then you'll like this I guess. I thought the first was reasonable but nothing overly special, so for me this has gone downhill. Am I being too hard on a kids film? well maybe but the film is so revoltingly sweet n sugary at times with zero originality I just can't sit back and not say it out loud.