The trailer made this movie look like it was going to be packed full of legitimately hilarious gags, and while it wasn't utterly devoid of them, it wasn't packed enough to make up for the thin character development, and if they wanted to do with fewer gags and go with the character development thing, they didn't devote nearly enough time to it. The villain was the most disappointing part for me (his opening was pretty funny, and Trey Parker is naturally hilarious), but he had almost nothing going for him after the first little bit of the movie.
My favourite parts of the movie were actually the minion sequences, which I thought were all pretty creative and funny. I also kind of gushed over the mom-daughter subplot a tiny bit, because I'm a piece of shit. Actually, on the note of the minions, I thought Minions was actually pretty good. My stepsister was laughing her head off in the theatre, and I was smiling through the whole thing.
The first Despicable Me felt like a really fresh, well-written movie (especially given that Pixar was the only studio making good animated movies at the time), and Illumination seemed very promising. It's a shame they got so lazy with the series.
Keane said:
Or in the actual movie Sing, why not have the characters being animals actually contribute something to the comedy or the plot? It really pales in comparison to a movie like Zootopia, oozing with visual gags and detail. I guess the only parts that really matter are the ones you can sell merchandise of. Oh well!
Now that's a really bizarre comparison, because aside from there being animals in a city (an aesthetic they
were obviously trying to capitalise on), they have nothing in common. Sing is probably my favourite Illumination movie, and to me, it proves they are a talented studio with a good vision that can successfully tie a number of well-written character arks together into a single, very well-paced movie, provided they don't let other garbage get in the way, which they didn't in Sing.
With that said, I actually do like Illumination a lot, they just have a pretty meh ratio of good-to-mediocre films. The only one I can't speak for is the Secret Life of Pets, though I heard it wasn't very inspired. Heck, I even thought Despicable Me 2 was surprisingly decent.
Spider-Man: Homecoming
This was actually really good. It felt a lot different than recent Marvel movies, which is a really good thing. It felt fresh; the direction was different, the action was kind of different, the tone was different, and it nailed Spider-Man. I thought he'd be annoying, but he wasn't at all! I really like how they managed to make Stark feel wise and intimidating despite him having already been in pretty much every other Marvel movie to date. I really hope this is the start of something new direction-wise for Marvel, because I found the second phase of their cinematic universe to be unbearably drab.
I would go into more detail, but I'm not really sure what to talk about. I guess I don't see the need to spoil a good film!