The Simpsons Movie (2007) * *

Directed by:  David Silverman


The Simpsons TV show has been around for nearly eighteen seasons, which is rare in the world of TV. Very few shows have had longer runs.   If you count their run on Fox's Tracey Ullman Show, The Simpsons have been around close to twenty years. The show's animation is hand-drawn and crude, but the sly, subversive, and sometimes gross-out humor is what viewers enjoy the most.   They exist in a timeless world of Springfield. Maggie is still a baby sucking on a pacifier after all of these years and Homer's father is still alive, despite being only slightly younger than God.

Truth be told, I think the show has outlived its sell-by date by nearly a decade.   There are only so many (sometimes) obscure pop culture allusions you can make without starting to become too clever for your own good.    If you don't believe me, check out a Dennis Miller stand-up routine.    These days, any given episode starts out with a couple of good jokes before sputtering toward the episode's conclusion.    The movie is a ninety-minute version of this, and quite frankly it began to drag early on.

I won't divulge too much of the plot.   The movie opens with an Itchy and Scratchy movie clip.   If you consider what these two have done to each other in the past seventeen years on the show, how much more over-the-top sadism can be mustered up?   Not much apparently.   Then, Homer interrupts the movie screening stating, "Why are we paying to watch something that we can see at home for free?" This, of course, is a wink to the paying audience of this movie and, soon after, I found myself agreeing with Homer.

The movie itself is actually very plot-driven, as if anyone cares about plots with The Simpsons. However, to summarize quickly, Homer adopts a pig about to be slaughtered and brings him home. There is no place to store the pig's excrement, so Homer builds a cheap metal silo to store the crap. Once filled, he dumps it into Springfield's already toxic (maybe even radioactive) lake.
This sets off a chain of events that ultimately leads to Springfield being encased in a dome by the EPA and U.S. President Arnold Schwarzenegger.

I won't go any further into plot details because it's not really why one would see a Simpsons movie. However, as the movie plodded on, I started to feel as if the movie was altogether unnecessary. Many of the more popular characters, like Mr. Burns, appear in what amount to cameos.   It's quite telling when a Tom Hanks cameo gets more lines than Mr. Burns or Moe get in the whole movie.   Did the movie expand on anything or present anything different than the show does every week?   No.

The movie had a couple of chuckles, but it ran out of comedic gas fairly early and stopped trying altogether at about the 45-minute mark.   Did the makers think that a few allusions here and there would keep things afloat? Probably.   But unlike a thirty-minute weekly show, you have a lot of screen time to fill and a few cute references aren't going to do the job.   You judge a movie like this based on whether it made you laugh fairly consistently, but I must say it did not.

Maybe this is the beginning of the end for The Simpsons. I can't imagine what more there is to say about the world of Springfield that hasn't already been said. The movie pretty much exemplifies why The Simpsons is becoming stale. You've heard 10,000 jokes about Homer's hair, weight, and stupidity if you've heard one. Perhaps I'm in the minority with my opinion. At the end of the film, there was a lot of clapping, but maybe because longtime Simpsons fans have waited too long for a movie to be disappointed in it.