Not the madcap movie I and others was expecting

Rating: 4/10 (30 June 2015)

Minions was simply not entertaining enough for me. The premise was decent and well set-up with the back story simple but effective. However, from there, I felt the story didn't really find a purpose or an interesting enough direction - not that I expected anything incredible as it is, by rights, a kids movie. But there lies the problem. I went to a 3pm showing on a Saturday so plenty of kids there. There is a laugh out loud moment about 5 minutes in and everyone, kids and adults alike, enjoyed it with a lot of giggles from the kids. That's the last laugh I remember hearing from the kids. The entire audience was more or less quiet for the remainder of the movie. The only real highlight of the rest of the movie was the family who give the Minions a ride to the Villain fest you may have seen in the trailer.
The reason for this, in my opinion is that the film-makers relied heavily on what I think they deduced worked from the Despicable Me movies - silly voices and funny talking. Without other decent characters such as Gru and the sisters to bounce this off, these silly voices etc. got old quickly to the point where you felt the Studio genuinely was trying to milk the characters popularity. Couple this with a lack of the usual madcap antics you expect from Minions and the movie just didn't work. It felt like Illumination Entertainment (IE) had run out of ideas. I also felt, as great an actor that Geoffrey Rush is, he wasn't the right voice to narrate the movie (or didn't put on the right voice) - not the usual gravitas I expect from the Narrator of any movie.
To sum up, the movie had such great promise but didn't deliver for me or the friend who watched it with me. IE seem to have run out of ideas which is possibly understandable given all the game and shorts spin-offs that they have done since Despicable Me 2.
P.S. I almost feel like IE should have made the controversial move of hiring Johnny Knoxville et al to inject the madcap antics and situations that were so blatantly missing (child friendly of course!). Now that would have been interesting