Family Guy Presents: It's a Trap! (2010)
★★ — Family Guy Presents: It's a Trap! (2010)
The third and final entry in Family Guy's Star Wars parody trilogy, Family Guy Presents: It's a Trap! arrived in December 2010 as a direct-to-video release produced by Fuzzy Door Productions and Fox Television Animation for 20th Century Fox Television. Like its predecessors, the special uses the framing device of the Griffin family, stuck at home during a power cut, being told a story that maps beat for beat onto one of the original Star Wars films, this time Return of the Jedi (1983). The trilogy had begun with Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest in 2007 and continued with Family Guy Presents: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side in 2009, both also directed by Peter Shin, making It's a Trap! the conclusion of a project that had been running for three years by the time it landed. At 43 minutes, it sits firmly in TV movie territory, and it was broadcast on Fox as well as released on home media, which is more or less its natural habitat.
Peter Shin, who helmed all three instalments, is a long-serving director within the Family Guy production setup, and the house style here is consistent with the main series: loose, cutaway-heavy, and built around a fairly small pool of recurring voice performers. Seth MacFarlane leads that ensemble as creator of the original series, voicing Peter Griffin and several other characters, alongside Alex Borstein, Seth Green, and Mila Kunis, all reprising their regular Family Guy roles. Carrie Fisher also appears, lending a certain knowing quality to proceedings given her association with the source material (she played Princess Leia in the original Star Wars trilogy, of course). The animation is handled to a polished but unremarkable standard, solid enough for television but not the kind of thing that demands a large screen. As a piece of production, it is competent and familiar, which is either reassuring or damning depending on your expectations going in. Fans of animated comedy might also find it worth comparing to something like Trolls, a very different beast, to appreciate how much tonal range animation as a medium can actually carry.
Family Guy: It’s a Trap!, the third and supposedly final installment of the Star Wars parody saga, comes with a warning right at the start: “This movie is worse than the previous two.” And honestly? They weren’t kidding. While Blue Harvest had novelty on its side and Something, Something Dark Side still delivered some laughs amid the chaos, It’s a Trap! feels like the joke has officially worn out its welcome. It’s sluggish, repetitive, and too often relies on gags that were tired ten episodes ago. The premise follows Return of the Jedi step by step, with Peter somehow still in charge, Stewie’s Vader angst going full Oedipal, and Emperor Palpatine replaced by an even more annoying version of himself, but the satire lacks bite. The cutaways feel forced, the pacing drags, and the animation, while technically improved, still can’t sell the epic scale of Jedi. What used to feel like clever parody now just feels like filler. The film knows it’s bad, leans into it, and expects you to laugh anyway. But knowing you’re watching a mess isn’t the same as enjoying it. Watchable if you're a diehard fan doing a marathon and don’t care, but otherwise, skip it. The force may be strong with the franchise, but this one has zero momentum. As they say: It’s a trap… indeed.
For me, that self-aware disclaimer at the opening pretty much sets the tone for everything that follows, and not in a good way. There is something a bit sad about a comedy that flags its own failings and then proceeds to repeat them anyway, as though the acknowledgement is supposed to do the work of actual jokes. I went in hoping for at least a few moments that recaptured the sharper edges of the first two, and there are one or two, but they are spread thin across a runtime that never quite justifies itself. If you have already sat through the earlier two, you will probably finish this one out of sheer stubbornness, as I did, but I would not call that a recommendation. Sometimes a trilogy really should have been a duology.
Rating: ★★ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2025-09-11
Trailer
▶ Watch the official trailer for Family Guy Presents: It's a Trap! (2010) on YouTube
Where to watch
Watch in the US
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Related on Movies With Macca
More from Peter Shin: Family Guy Presents: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side (2009) · Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest (2007)
More with Seth MacFarlane: Family Guy Presents: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side (2009) · Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest (2007)
More from the 2010s: Wonder (2017) · Beautiful Boy (2018) · The Witch (2015) · What We Do in the Shadows (2014)
More animation: Fantastic Planet (1973) · Alice in Wonderland (1951) · Mononoke the Movie: The Phantom in the Rain (2024) · Mononoke the Movie: Chapter II - The Ashes of Rage (2025)
More comedy: The Eagle (1925) · The General (1926) · Americana (2023) · The Naked Gun: From the Files of Police Squad! (1988)
