One for the Kids

Rating: 5/10 (24 August 2007)

This wasn't at all what I expected. Sadly, The Simpsons Movie has fallen into the "let's dumb this down for the masses" trap. Big time. I am one of those sad losers who thought The Simpsons, in their prime, were the greatest thing since sliced bread. Off beat, intelligent humour that had an ability to draw you into each episode like nothing else on T.V. at the time. Recently it has lost it's originality and that is to be expected from such a long running series. As soon as they killed off Flanders' wife it was obvious, to me, that they had reached the bottom of the creative well. So, as happens when they the creators are desperate to keep the show afloat, they start writing sub Tom and Jerry style slapstick with plenty of prepubescent story lines and boring, bandwagon current affairs themes. And so it carries on with The Simpsons Movie. A mixed bag of rehashed old jokes with a virtually no original gags apart from SpiderPig and that was washed clean of laughs because some company f-wit thought it would be a riot to show it on all the trailers ! What a waste. They also tried to cram every single previous character into this film. Obviously, they couldn't so it leaves everyone wondering where their particular favourites were. Sideshow Bob etc. Would it have been impossible to write a plot that revolves strictly around certain characters without the need for the stupid cameos ? All this and I won't even begin to mention what I thought of the Bart skate boarding scene or Homer making advances to the pig scene. The Simpsons in their heyday never needed to resort to this sort of low level garbage for laughs. In the long run this film will be forgotten. Banished to the sin bin of movie waste products and the classic episodes can be re-run forever.