After years of speculation and rumors, Matt Groening and his team of animators finally gave fans of The Simpsons a full-length feature film. The question on everyone’s collective mind was “Will it be any good?” I would say that the answer to this question is an unenthusiastic ‘yes.’When the band Green Day is killed by pollution at a lakeside concert, the city of Springfield falls under the watchful eye of the Environmental Protection Agency. The town, driven by Lisa Simpson and an Irish boy she has a crush on, cleans the lake up for good. Until Homer screws everything up that is. After adopting a pig and storing its feces in a backyard silo, Homer needs to get rid of the pig poop. Homer accidentally dumps the load into the lake, making the pollution problem even worse. President Arnold Schwarzenegger (hey, it’s The Simpsons) decides to seal the town inside a giant glass dome.
Springfield discovers Homer’s slop silo in the lake and tries to kill him. Homer and family manage to escape via a secret sinkhole in their backyard. Now outside the dome, they head to Alaska. When the Simpsons learn that the government is going to put a bomb in the dome to destroy Springfield completely, Homer doesn’t care. After all, they did try to kill him. The rest of the family won’t have it and go back to help, leaving Homer on a long and weird path to redemption.
The spirit of The Simpsons lives on in this super-sized, 83-minute film but it never strives to be much more than a cheeky mega-sode. Die-hard fans of the series will eat The Simpsons Movie up with relish and may sing its praises long into the night, but for casual viewers, it’s a little underwhelming.
The good news is that The Simpsons Movie does not look or feel like an episode of The Simpsons. Kudos to the filmmakers for making the film flow like a real film rather than a series of episodes spliced together. There are no fade-to-black transitions where commercial breaks would normally occur (unlike Family Guy Presents Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story). The animators even step things up a notch by adding depth to the characters and their environment.
The bad news is that the content of The Simpsons Movie is barely elevated above what can be expected from the TV show. Die-hard fans will dispute that the show is past its prime but die-hards (regardless of what they support) will almost always make excuses. Nobody can deny that The Simpsons have lost their edge over their now 21-year run on the airwaves. The show’s wit, skewering of American culture and political incorrectness made it an instant hit in 1989 but it no longer remains edgy and relevant in popular culture thanks to the likes of South Park and Family Guy.
That’s not to say that The Simpsons Movie won’t make you laugh. In fact, it will. Just not as often as you would probably like. Viewers who are familiar with the show will get a kick out of all the supporting character cameos (and there are quite a lot of them). The supporting characters who oftentimes add so much to the episodes take a pretty distant back seat, which is a shame, but the nature of the story being told doesn’t require them nearly at all to begin with.
Those who still watch The Simpsons on TV will likely laugh at all the zany antics on display. The show has become more about Homer’s screwball ideas and random acts than lampooning our culture and that continues in the movie. About half of what Homer does is genuinely funny and worth a chuckle at the least. Other times, the gimmicks and punch lines feel forced or trite.
The story itself fails to stand out among some of the show's classic plots but it is large enough in scope to merit the full-length treatment. The conflict and resolution are par for the course for The Simpsons but sometimes the journey from Point A to Point B seems unnecessary or fails to make much sense. This can make it a little hard to enjoy if you’re of the opinion that it’s the journey that matters, not the ending. Then again, this is The Simpsons we’re talking about, so you probably shouldn’t take it too much to heart.
Like any long-in-production film, the hype and expectations certainly contribute to the undoing of this film. While the scope of the plot is bigger, the purpose of the film is no bigger than the purpose of any Simpsons episode. The Simpsons Movie will almost certainly entertain you but I can’t shake the feeling that this overlong and under-funny episode of a film came out ten years too late.
RATING: 3 out of 5
