Genre Animation

Family Guy Presents: It's a Trap! (2010)

Item: Family Guy Presents: It's a Trap!
Rating: 2.0
Author: Ross McLaren

★★ — Family Guy Presents: It's a Trap! (2010)

They warned us. Right there, at the very start of It's a Trap!, the show's own characters look down the barrel and tell you: this one's worse than the last two. And I'll give them credit for that. It takes a certain kind of audacity to open your film with a disclaimer about its own quality. The problem is, knowing something is a mess and actually enjoying it are two very different things, and this special never quite bridges that gap.

I've been along for the whole ride with this trilogy. When I reviewed Family Guy Presents: Blue Harvest (2007), I thought the concept was genuinely inspired. Translating A New Hope beat for beat through the Griffin family filter had novelty, affection and enough sharp gags to earn its runtime. And when I covered Family Guy Presents: Something, Something, Something, Dark Side (2009), I found it wobbling but still capable of landing a decent punch every now and then. By the time we get here, to the Return of the Jedi instalment, the joke has simply run out of road.

The structure is the same as before: follow the source material step by step, drop in cutaway gags, let the characters complain about being in a parody, repeat. What made that formula feel breezy in Blue Harvest feels like a slog here. The pacing is off. Scenes that should crackle drag on past the point where anyone's laughing, and the cutaways, which were once the engine of the whole thing, now feel like they've been scraped from the bottom of the writers' room barrel. You can practically hear the desperation in some of them.

The Stewie and Vader material goes full Oedipal in a way that's more exhausting than funny, and the Emperor replacement lands with a thud rather than a cackle. There's a version of this where the big finale, lifted wholesale from one of the most emotionally charged sequences in the entire Star Wars saga, generates some actual comedy through contrast. That version isn't this one. The animation has visibly improved across the three specials, I'll grant them that, but technical polish can't compensate for a script that's running on fumes.

What frustrates me most is the self-awareness. The show leans hard into the idea that it knows it's phoning this in, winking at the audience constantly, as if acknowledging the laziness gets you off the hook for it. It doesn't. Metacommentary only works when there's something underneath it worth commenting on. Here it's just a shield, a way of saying "we know this isn't very good" without actually doing the work to make it better.

If you're a committed fan and you've watched the first two and you want to finish the set, go ahead. I understand the impulse. There are a handful of moments that raise a smile, and the whole thing clocks in at a length that won't destroy your evening. But if you're coming to this fresh, looking for a decent laugh, I'd honestly point you back towards Blue Harvest and leave it there. The first one captured something. This one's just going through the motions.

Two stars. The force is not strong with this one.

Rating: ★★ | Year: 2010 | Watched: 2025-09-11

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