Family Guy: It's A Trap! Review

Family Guy: It’s A Trap!

Well I got my hands on the third spoof in the Family Guy Star Wars Trilogy simply titled: “It’s A Trap!” I wanted to watch this sooner than I did but after being let down by yesterday’s review I was afraid that I’d be let down again. The plot is obviously taken from Return of the Jedi which was actually my favorite of the original Star Wars Trilogy so that was a check in the plus column to start with.

I was really happy that since the cast of Family Guy is growing smaller that they decided to include characters from The Cleveland Show: Cleveland Brown, Rallo Tubbs and Tim the Bear; and from American Dad: Roger and Klaus. I do like the idea that they had Carrie Fisher’s character Angela ended up being Mon Mothma since she is a direct link to the Star Wars movies but since American Dad is finally getting some love I would have liked it better if they used Francine in Angela’s place.

While this third outing isn’t as funny as Blue Harvest or Something, Something, Something Dark Side this one for me at least retains a higher rewatch factor than Blue Harvest and is overall more entertaining than Something, Something, Something Dark Side and like I said before it does give The Cleveland Show and American Dad some much needed love.

The set up is the same as the first two movies, Peter tells a story to help pass the time while the power is out – only this time the family already knows that Peter will be telling Return of the Jedi. We get the recurring joke of Meg showing up only as some hideous creature, the usual fart jokes by Peter and quite a bit of Seth Green bashing – of course there are the usual remarks about Stewie’s sexuality but they do that in practically every episode of the series in general. The text crawl at the start is particularly funny considering it’s all about Seth saying that he didn’t want to do a third movie but Fox was forcing him to and how he let his assistants write this installment because he couldn’t care less about it. It was actually funny because of the ending where Chris and Peter are debating who is a bigger jerk Seth MacFarlane or Seth Green and Chris points out that Fox insists on releasing the Family Guy dvds in multiple volumes for a full season.

The animation surprised me it was really crisp and the backgrounds in scenes were spectacular to look at, in fact it really helped the fact that roughly the first 20ish minutes of the movie do kind of drag on and move a bit slowly but the backgrounds pulled me in enough that I didn’t mind it. There was one thing that I got sick of rather quickly was the scene with the Sarlaac Pit and all the staring went on a lot longer than it needed to.

I said with my last review that I think Family Guy should bow out of the regular TV series and just do direct to dvd features and this only reaffirms my statement. If you look at It’s A Trap and compare it to Partial Terms of Endearment It’s A Trap is a far superior product. Could you Imagine what we would get if they did a Matrix Trilogy spoof, a Lord of the Rings spoof or even a special Halloween release that spoofs Saw? Now those I’d watch in a heartbeat but I’m finding it increasingly harder to watch the regular episodes once and that’s a real shame considering I’ve already watched It’s A Trap twice.

Rating: A