Is this a crime against muppets?
Jim Henson, creator of the loveable fuzzy puppets, must be spinning in his grave as his son creates a gross, Muppet-style smutfest
FILM OF THE WEEK The Happytime Murders Cert: 16 1hr 31mins ★★★★★
Jim Henson, creator of The Muppets and for millions of us the only real voice of Kermit the Frog, died 28 years ago, and for most of those three decades his legacy has seemed splendidly secure.
In the 10 years after his father’s death, son Brian directed two Muppet feature films – including the much-loved Muppet Christmas Carol – and produced a third. Even when The Muppets were sold to Walt Disney in 2004, their future seemed set fair, despite only modest success at the box office of The Muppets (2011) and Muppets Most Wanted (2014).
And then Brian Henson – yes, the same Brian Henson who directed the delicious Muppet Christmas Carol – appeared to have what I can only describe as a brainstorm, convincing himself that what the world really needed was an adult, X-certificate grossout comedy starring, if not the actual Muppets (Disney would never have allowed that), then puppet characters that are clearly Muppet-inspired. The Happytime Murders is the extraordinary result.
The first F-word lands within seconds; the first visit to a puppet sex shop within minutes. Those of a nervous disposition will be relieved to know that it’s the best part of an hour before the first puppet sex scene arrives, albeit in a way that, like so much in this provocatively tasteless movie, defies description in a family newspaper possibly being read over the Sunday breakfast table. It really is the strangest film: the disaster is that it’s not funnier.
But at least some of the structural components are readily recognisable. For just as the wonder- ful Who Framed Roger Rabbit posited a world shared by human and cartoon characters alike, so The Happytime Murders imagines a Los Angeles where human and puppet exist alongside each other, albeit with puppets very much the social underdogs. ‘It’s not a crime to be warm and fuzzy,’ growls the central character of Phil Philips, ‘but it might as well be.’ Philips is a private investigator, underlining another similarity with Roger Rabbit, namely that this also has aspirations to be a film noir, complete with private eye and a femme fatale. But while Jessica Rabbit undoubtedly had class alongside those cartoon curves, from the moment Sandra White – a puppet – sashays into Philips’s office complaining that she’s being blackmailed by people threatening to expose her insatiable sexual appetite, it’s clear she and ‘class’ have never been acquainted.
Nevertheless, he takes the case and it’s while pursuing the first clue – nope, can’t explain that either, just as I daren’t even mention the octopus and the cow – that the first killing takes place. And when a second soon follows, it becomes clear that someone is killing the cast of The Happytime Gang – apparently the first show to be enjoyed by humans and puppets alike – one by one. But with that cast including Philips’s brother (a particularly vain puppet with bleached skin tones and a human nose) and a former girlfriend (human), it’s not long before he becomes suspect and investigator.
Spare a thought for the human actors involved, although in the case of Melissa McCarthy, who plays the human detective who used to be Philips’s police partner, perhaps not too much of one. She has, after all, made a lot of pretty tasteless films herself, although a scene that sees her wrestling in a hot tub with a blue felt puppet before biting him in the groin surely represents a new career low.
Elsewhere, Elizabeth Banks makes a brief but still surely ill-advised appearance as an actress-turned-stripper, while Maya Rudolph, hitherto almost escaping with her professional dignity intact as Philips’s quietly besotted secretary, Bubbles, is eventually reduced to putting on a brave professional face while yet more unmentionable goings-on unfold messily behind her.
Yes, it will make a few teenagers giggle, what with a denouement that involves a puppet replay of Sharon Stone’s leg-crossing scene from Basic Instinct. But the simple facts are that Todd Berger’s screenplay is not clever enough, funny enough or classy enough to entertain a wider audience – shortcomings that Henson’s lacklustre direction cannot conceal. Father Jim must be spinning in his grave.
Aspirations to be a film noir, complete with private eye and femme fatale