Vast Potential Fun, But Frustratingly Underplayed

Rating: 5/10 (25 June 2015)

What an enviable list of voice-over stars.
What fun characters mouthing multi-language pseudo-meaninged gibberish (as opposed to just gibberish).
What a great start with a series of interesting minion history snippets (all of them already in the trailer - yes, those are the best bits and nothing else in the rest of the movie comes close).
What frustration when the gear just gets stuck - and the whole thing numbingly grinds into predictable land with uninteresting plot, an array of boring characters  blah blah  and ends up just another multimillion gibberish animation.
After the first 10 mins, Minions is plagued by too many unnecessary pointless characters, plain villains, inconsequential dialogue and actions  and the boredom (and depression) that the Minions experience on screen is unfortunately also paralleled at the same time by the audience and never really lifted up after that.
Surprisingly, Allison Janney's character and voice was the most distinctive, but it was only a minor role. Sandra Bullock's villain Scarlett Overkill is way underdone, and the character visualization lacks any wickedly engaging factor, just boringly unlikeable. Jon Hamm's character adds nothing at all to the flimsy plot and his voice is too generic to matter as to who is doing it. All the other stars had inconsequential and indistinctive who-cares voice-overs.
The whole thing is so bland that the leery voice of Young Gru (Steve Carrell) right at movie's end was such a welcomed relief - at last (and alas it was the end) a little promise of inventive fun  but way too late.
Watch it, but don't expect too much and you'd probably be mildly entertained.