Futurama: Bender’s Game
2008
Directed by Dwayne Carrey-Hill
Story by Matt Groening, Eric Horsted and David X. Cohen
Being a fan of all things geeky, humor both surreal and gross, and brightly colored cartoons, I instantly fell in love with Futurama way back in 1999 when the show premiered on Fox. The brainchild of Simpsons Matt Groening and David X. Cohen, the show was for super-geeks by super-geeks. There were smart-ass hard-drinking robots, hilariously disgusting aliens and math/science/pop-culture jokes a-plenty, with some of the smoothest animation ever seen on American television. The show was a triumph…and unceremoniously cancelled in 2003 after 72 episodes.
A little less than four years later, the old creative team has been reassembled to create four direct-to-DVD movies for Fox’s home entertainment division, proving along with Firefly/Serenity’s continued existence in comics and an MMO that in this age good sci-fi doesn’t die, it just shifts media.
We’re on the third of the four movies though, and I’m starting to wonder whether it’s really all worth it.
The first installment of this new deal, Bender’s Big Score, suggested that Groening & Co. had hit the ground running and not lost any of their mojo in the time since cancellation. It was a tight, witty comedy that had fun with sci-fi conventions while actually adhering to them. It was, in short, everything the series had been at its best moments. The second, The Beast With a Billion Backs, lost a little of it’s sci-fi cred and didn’t have as well put together a story, but it was funny enough that I didn’t feel slighted for having watched it. Our penultimate entry, Bender’s Game, continues the trend of slacking quality.
The story of Bender’s Game is a mish-mash of two ideas – a duel with perennial corporate villain Mom over a dark matter fuel shortage and D&D gaming causing a rift in reality – that might have been funny for a half hour seperately but never really come together over the 87 minute running time. More and more I’m getting the idea that these guys fluked with Bender’s Big Score and might not have what it takes to do features. I would have much rather had them do a real 5th season of one-off weekly stories than try to string along weak plots into full length movies that don’t have the humor to support themselves.
And that’s the real cardinal sin of this movie: it’s simply not funny. Put aside the fact that it’s trying to tell two stories and doing neither particularly well; the gags in both fall flat, and that’s simply inexcusable in a comedy no matter what else happens. I spent the first half of the movie waiting for the Lord of the Rings/D&D parody that’s supposed to be the selling point to show up, and it seems the writing team was as well, throwing almost zero effort into the endeavor. All the funny comes from Bender’s decent into tabletop-gaming incited madness, and that may have more to do with vocal genius Joe DeMagio being funny no matter what he does. That guy could make cargo manifests funny.
And when we finally do get to the weird fantasy send-up portion it too is disappointing. Less Terry Pratchett and more National Lampoon, the creative team just didn’t capitalize on their premise. The jokes are all either really bad puns (Hermaphrodite? Frydo? I oughta punch you in the dick), bog standard fantasy tropes (oooh, the wizard’s a crazy old man! Funny), or nonsensical in a really bad way (Morks? What the fuck? I think I’m the only person in the target audience who even knows what Mork & Mindy is.)
By the time the movie wraps up its completely ancillary plot, leaving us with one actually funny joke (mush, you little Nibblonians! Mush!) I had a deep sense of forboding for the fourth film. It promises to be a “truly epic sci-fi adventure,” so maybe a return to the genre will herald some improvement. Here’s hoping.
