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They're just not putting the effort in. This film was perfunctory, a few separate ideas behind different set-pieces and nothing really tying it together. The super-powered minions who are the focus of so much marketing are barely in it, and pointless. Gru's new baby son is nothing but plot point, there's no family dynamics on show. A waste of Will Ferrell as a supervillain with no supervillainy outside of threatening Gru. This film is really lazy family blockbuster-by-numbers stuff.

It terms of animation, the film looks as good as ever, plenty of attention to detail throughout and a nice bright colour palette. I liked the idea of the neighbour teenager wannabe supervillain. But it's typical of this movie that, only introduced mid-way through and given one set-piece, she turns up from nowhere at the end in chitty-chitty-bang-bang to rescue the master story.

Despicable Me 3 was pretty poor as well. Right now I got to go see these films because I still have one kid (of three) under 10. If we get the same gap before the next one that we did between this and the last Minions movie, she'll have aged out of the franchise and with any luck I won't have to bother taking them again. I certainly won't be making any effort to bring the next to their attention.

William Gillette may well have made his name playing Sherlock Holmes but he must have been playing to some very unsophisticated audiences. This film shows very badly now - mouldy, stagy, an ancient Holmes and a nonsense plot. Gillette himself is a woeful actor, offering up romantic lead reactions from a grandfather's body (I'm sure he's wearing a wig). When he puts on a disguise to fool the villains his obviously fake nose is like something from Clouseau. The story is meaningless. We're constantly being told stuff while nothing really happens. Everything is set up for Holmes to win, the biggest challenge he faces is when a pair of villains refuse to deliver his visiting card. It's easy to be the great detective when you already know everything and have your agent in the villains' house as their butler. I couldn't follow who did what or why in the second half at all.

There are two things of interest in the film - the first is how different a Holmes we are presented, before decades of convention have set their expectations of what we should see Sherlock Holmes do - here he's more like Hannay than the Holmes we know - and the strange fades that occur occasionally without the scene going anywhere, though the focus will shift a little - in a little bit, or out a little bit, or slightly across the room. These are effective, like watching some inexplicable Lynchian shift in reality. But I guess they only did them because the cameras couldn't zoom yet.

A very odd show, I didn't understand at all what I was seeing as a kid - not in a "wow, whatever's going to happen next?" kind of way, more of a "I don't understand what this is supposed to be."

With hindsight I see now that someone had the idea of converting three icons of comedy into a Saturday morning kids' cartoon - Chaplin was presented as a comedy cat, two characters from the old Rowan and Martin show as whatever they were, and Groucho Marx as a wise-cracking cat. And these characters presented Saturday-morning grade comic antics about on the same level as the Pink Panther cartoon, ie not really all that funny. From my perspective the trouble was that, while I was familiar with Chaplin and could see that that's what the baggy-pants cat was presenting, I had no knowledge of Groucho beyond the iconography and, being British, had never heard of the Laugh-in. So these characters were just baffling. I don't know how the producers could have thought it would be meaningful to the target audience - I guess even American kids of the right age-group would be too young for the referneces. Not funny enough to justify their eccentricities, I watched this show simply because it's what was on.