Review of Futurama: Bender's Game (2008) by Kenny M — 06 Nov 2008

This is the third of the Futurama movies, the first being the excellent Bender's Big Score and the second being the mediocre Beast With a Billion Backs.

Bender's Game has quite a few significant issues with it. For starters, the plot is awkward and barely manages to pull off a narrative, even less so than BwaBB. Like BBS, it manages to tie some of the plotline to the series, which is nice, but it isn't nearly as awesome or well implemented as it was in BBS. The jokes all end up being extremely basic and the sort of things someone just introduced to the concept of humor would enjoy. It does manage to throw in some of the quick, "wait..." jokes, and some of the ridiculous personalities we've come to expect from the characters, but it's very lightly sprinkled throughout, much overshadowed by cliched and immature humor styles. Through this adaption of a less unique humor style, Futurama begins to feel less like a witty cartoon and more like an actual fantasy movie. Taking it even further, BG implements the most cliched references in the book, "I am your father" and "My precious." They even stress the personality of the stupid son of Mom, resorting to him for laughs just because he says things in a simplistic language and does things counter-intuitively. I can't help but say that all of this ended up culminating into a film that bored me for much of the time, but despite all that, the Futurama mood, if not the humor, is still intact to some degree with a light implementation of the show's humor style, and a good implementation of the ridiculous concepts and sci-fi that come with anything that is truly Futurama. Should you watch it? Well, no. But if you're a Futurama fan, you're definitely not going to come out of it thinking Futurama has jumped shark. Because it hasn't. Now we have one more Futurama movie waiting for us, and hopefully this one will be able to tie them all together and use the series's humor well so we can be sure that Futurama is worthy of the same respect it used to deserve.