Futurama: Bender's Game

The third of a series of four planned Futurama spin-off TV movies, Bender’s Game follows Bender’s Big Score and Beast With A Billion Backs, and comfortably sits alongside them. It’s good, and it’s sometimes very funny, but is unlikely still to be regarded as vintage Futurama.

The plot of Bender’s Game takes the regulars on a mission that soon sees them in a strange land, which bears a striking resemblance to something out of Dungeons and Dragons or Lord of the Rings. This isn’t, as you’d expect, the safest place to be, and thus the scene is set for lots of genre gags that are, at their finest, hard to resist.

On the downside, the pacing is a little off this time round, and it takes Bender’s Game some time to hit its stride. The quest part of the movie doesn’t kick into until well over half the running time is up, and while there’s real ambition in the narrative, it does demand some patience.

But still, even if this isn’t top notch Futurama, it still packs in plenty of belly laughs, and squeezes more entertainment into 84 minutes than many movies get close to in two hours. You still yearn for the tightness of the TV show format, but the quality of the writing just about drags Bender’s Game through, leaving us thirsting for the fourth, and potentially final, movie. --Jon Foster