Stewie Griffin: The Untold Story

Stewie Griffin has a lot of fans, as you would expect, and quite a few are comparing The Untold Story to The South Park Movie, which, I feel, is a fair comparison. Does it match up to Bigger, Longer and Uncut? No. For the simple reason that the South Park movie has a plot, a story and a point to make, speaking loudly against censorship, in favour of free speech. The Family Guy film just uses the "uncut" slogan as a way of dragging in more vulgar humour.

Originally conceived as a movie and then broken up into three individual episodes for airing on TV, it comes in three very noticeable sections. As separate episodes, there is no real story at all and nothing to make you catch it again the next week, because there are loads of little sub-plots that begin but never finish.

Most of these stories are geared in Stewie's direction, but not so much that the movie should be named after him. Every half hour it goes in a new direction and we never feel like we're getting anywhere, other than into something else to make fun of. I can't really give a breakdown of the film, as it just goes all over the place. So much more could have become of a feature length Family Guy, but Seth MacFarlane and Co do nothing with it and seize no opportunity other than swearing and racier humour.

However, it is very funny and there are some classic moments that will have you in suffocating fits of laughter, such as the wacky, waving, inflatable, arm-flailing tube man commercial, the Thundercats scene, Britney Spears getting burned alive, the scene that dumps on the shoddy morals and ethics of Blockbuster Video, the restaurant with Tom Tucker's private booth and... well, pretty much everything is spot on. But this scatter-shot approach to comedy has all the sophistication of sticking a 12-bore into a crowd and pulling the trigger. Sure, you're going to hit everyone, but it's not very clever. And unless you're a total movie genius, a lot of the in-jokes will leave you in the dark.

Family Guy was never about subtlety, or holding back on the mayhem. If anything, it's the modern equivalent of Looney Tunes. Anyone who hoped for something big, or even king-sized, from this 88-minute animated feature will be sorely disappointed. It succeeds at exactly what it wants to do; it makes us laugh hysterically. However, it could/should have been more - depends on what you expect.

It's still a billion times better than Pokemon: The Movie, although that's hardly a compliment.