Extremely disappointing. Not up to the usual Simpsons standard

Rating: 5/10 (29 July 2007)

When you watch the Simpsons, you know not to expect a life-changing earth-shattering event so I went into the cinema with my box of doughnuts, saying "doh!" to the cinema employees and settled back to watch what I thought would be a barrel of laughs. Now that it's over, my initial thought was "what the hell was that?"
Now before you say "ah, he's in Germany. They have no humour there", let me set the record straight by saying that I am British and the British sense of humour is the best in the world. We even "get" the Simpsons. But this was struggling for laughs from the get-go. When you have to introduce a pig as "Spider-Pig" then you know the movie is in trouble.
I think the problem is that the Simpsons is only really designed to be a 20 minute television episode. To stretch it to 90 minutes is really pushing it. The movie tries to be all things to all people by pushing in as many characters as possible and as many plots as possible. The sub-plots (such as Spider-Pig) are just plain stupid (even by Simpsons standards) and the producers couldn't even resist making a political statement by including Itchy (or was it Scratchy?) as President Hillary Clinton's Vice-President or making a dig at Alaska's dependency on the oil companies. They even had Lisa lampooning Al Gore by making an environmental speech called "An Irritating Truth".
The one moment that got the biggest laugh was US President Arnold Schwarzenegger who said to his aide "I was elected to lead, not to read!".
During the closing credits, Maggie utters her first word : "Sequel?". I certainly hope not.