I apologize for the belated nature of this piece. I was pensive in the first place about even seeing The Simpsons Movie, and now that I have, I can honestly say that it was exactly what I expected it to be. The Simpsons Movie contains all of the elements that have made the later seasons of the show damn near unwatchable: pointless celebrity cameos, topical jokes that fall flat, a pronounced mob mentality among Springfield’s denizens that trumps the individual personalities of certain characters, jokes that revolve around Homer violently injuring himself and, worst of all, the cat lady. But let’s save her for later.
Most confounding of all is how poorly they utilize the character voiced by Albert Brooks. This is simply unconscionable considering that even in rather poor episodes of the television show, any character voiced by Brooks was invariably funny. In the movie he’s supplied with a few semi-humorous lines of dialogue (“I want 10,000 tough guys and I want 10,000 soft guys to make the tough guys look tougher”), but nothing consistent enough to match him up with the comic brilliance of characters like Mr. Scorpio or Tab Spangler.
The movie supplies a cumbersome plot involving excessive pollution to Lake Springfield that threatens to destroy the city’s ecosystem. This plot mainly serves as an excuse for the writers to drag out a fairly obvious parody of An Inconvenient Truth and make some juvenile jabs at the current administration’s policies on the environment. Making Arnold Schwarzenegger president probably sounded funny on paper, but when put to celluloid, it just represents more white noise for this movie. Like many movies based on television shows, the film feels like an extended, more expertly animated episode. And while some efforts at this have proved successful, The Simpsons Movie wears on the audience more than it pleases them.
Then there’s the appearance of the cat lady. Although her scene is brief enough, it still represents an aspect of The Simpsons so degenerate and asinine that even a mere second of screen time caused me to shudder. The cat lady belongs to that group of characters — Disco Stu, Cletus the slackjawed yokel, Gil — who came into the series on a single, funny joke, only to be continually and painfully resurrected whenever an episode was wearing thin. Her appearance in the film only helps to accent the desperation with which the writers struggled for jokes here.
All in all, I could probably count on two hands the number of times I laughed hard throughout the film. I knew it would be disappointing, so on the one hand I’m not surprised, but for it to stumble as badly as it did nevertheless remains appalling. It’s time to throw in the towel here, declare The Simpsons officially dead and move on with our lives. At nineteen seasons and counting the show has turned into a grim death march.
