More negative reception came from the magazine "Empire", where reviewer Ian Nathan compared the film to New Coke, saying that "it utterly failed". Phil Villarreal believed that there were "too few laugh-worthy moments" and that "instead of stretching to new frontiers, the film rests on the familiar". Sheila Johnston criticized the pacing of the film and its joke level saying that "the overall momentum flags at times" and that it was "a salvo of comic squibs, some very funny, others limp". David Edwards agreed with this, writing that although "there's a great half-hour show rattling around...the rest is padding at its very dullest", concluding that it "isn't a terrible film, just a terribly disappointing one." Cosmo Landesman believed, "the humour seem to have lost its satirical bite and wit" and that "much of the comedy is structured around the idiocy of Homer". This assessment was shared by Carina Chocano of the "Los Angeles Times", who felt that "once the movie wanders into its contemplation of mortality and meaning, the trenchancy kind of creaks and falls off." She negatively compared it to "" (1999), a film similarly adapted from an animated television series, saying that, in terms of satire, it offers "nothing we don't hear every night on "The Daily Show with Jon Stewart"." Bruce Newman criticized the fleeting appearances of many of the show's secondary characters, and found the film to be "a disappointment".