Dir: David Silverman
With: Dan Castellaneta, Julie Kavner, Nancy Cartwright, Yeardley Smith

Trust Homer to get his retaliation in first. It's the opening minutes of the most eagerly awaited movie of the decade. An episode of Itchy and Scratchy has just finished and the fat, bald, yellow guy sitting in the cinema, just like us, jumps to his feet.

"I can't believe we're paying to see something we get on TV for free!"

But then The Simpsons Movie isn't just any old something. If it was, some of us wouldn't have spent the night before the screening behaving like a child on Christmas Eve.

After 17 years, 400 episodes, and 23 Emmys, the biggest something to hit the small screen was about to be super-sized.

Was it slightly disappointing? Of course.

Given the build-up, and short of Homer leaping from the screen, assuming mortal form and turning water into Duff beer, that was inevitable.

Will you still love it tomorrow? Yes.

Since Bush Snr instituted the Simpsons test ("America needs to be a lot more like the Waltons and a lot less like the Simpsons") it would be treasonable, blasphemous, just plain wrong, to do otherwise.

One of the main reasons, it was said, why it took so long to get a movie off the ground was that the creative team wanted it to be a genuinely cinematic experience and not just three, half-hour episodes stuck together.

As far as the story goes, Matt Groening and his cast of a thousand collaborators have succeeded. The plot is suitably odyssean and the characters undertake the kind of personal journeys today's American cinema adores.

In this, the influence of James L Brooks, series developer and writer-director of As Good As It Gets and Terms of Endearment, is obvious. Homer, Marge, Lisa and Bart aren't allowed to just fool around for an hour and a half, they have to "grow" as characters.

Time was when Groening might have mocked this notion mercilessly. Now, although he and director David Silverman don't entirely swallow it whole, they do push America's first family to their emotional limits, sometimes uncomfortably so.

The story starts with a pig dressed up to the nines, but then you probably guessed that. The porcine one, that's the pig, not Homer, is the model in a photo-shoot for a new Krusty burger.

When the clown suggests the pig is for the chop, Homer steps in with one of those brilliant observations for which he is now justifiably more famous than his epic poem-writing namesake. "You can't kill him if he's wearing people clothes!"

Some of the film's funniest scenes centre on the friendship between man and beast. The curly-tailed one is also at the centre of events which prompt the family to leave their beloved Springfield. Cast out into the wilderness, the famous Simpson family bond, usually river deep, mountain high, comes under strain.

Depending on how gritty you like your 'toons, this is either where the movie enjoys its finest moments or runs into trouble.

From the start The Simpsons has made a virtue of honesty. Groening's was the original fly-on-the-wall show about modern family life.

While fearless in dispensing home truths, it always pulled back from being too brutal, knowing that there is a difference between gently probing the area around a raw nerve and sticking a dirty great finger into the wound. At times, the drama gets a little too close to the latter for comfort.

Once the script gets back to what The Simpsons does best - splicing clever verbals with witty visuals and hammering on pure slapstick - the movie enters safer ground.

The closing segments are spectacular and cinematic, everything Groening wanted. At other times the characters seem lost up there. One scene featuring Lisa going door to door was a bit like "Where's Waldo?"

As for the jokes, nothing succeeds in The Simpsons like excess, with the best gags the ones that go the extra inch into ludicrousness, like Marge pausing to wipe a dish clean as she flees a burning building. There are lots of swipes at Fox, Disney, the meeja in general, and a US government led by president Schwarzenegger.

More often than not, the 12-strong writing team led by Groening hits the mark. They just don't enter laugh-out-loud, spray-Pepsi-through-the-nostrils, where's-my-inhaler, territory.

It's a testament to how beloved Groening's creations are that the audience will turn up to the cinema expecting this to be the case, but then it's never that way when you watch the programme on the small screen.

Minute by minute, there's still more fun to be had from The Simpsons Movie than anything else you're likely to see this year. As for it being not quite the Second Coming in cinematic terms, we'll live.

Love of The Simpsons means never having to say you're sorry they made a movie that was routinely excellent rather than out of this world.