Not for the children
How well does an adult-themed puppet film work?
Puppet copulation is by no means a new phenomenon. Broadway musical Avenue Q was like Sesame Street with self-consciously risqué “adult themes”, and Team America: World Police (2004) had marionettes getting it on with filthy abandon in one notorious set-piece.
To see the Jim Henson Company going R-rated counts, at least, as a novelty of sorts. The Happytime Murders springs from the imagination of Jim’s son Brian, previously responsible for directing The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. In neither of those did you get to see an octopus puppet manually (tentacularly?) pleasuring a prostrate cow in a sex shop.
Like all the major laughs in the film, this arrives early – if only they had a little more staying power. Brazenly echoing Who Framed Roger Rabbit, the script asks us to occupy a noirish version of LA, where puppets are second-class citizens and humans rule. The private dick, Phil Philips, is a blue, furry loner, voiced with gravelly cool by Bill Barretta, who’s drawn into a spate of mysterious killings linked to an old puppet TV show. His former partner in the LAPD is a bruiser played by Melissa Mccarthy, topping the human cast. The film needs her badly: that unimpressed resting face of hers goes some way to supplying otherwise absent amusement as the fluffy corpses pile up.
In fairness, there’s one punchline that’s legitimately and lewdly hilarious, involving a vast quantity of silly string being sprayed all over the walls of Phil’s office, after he’s dabbled in a Chinatown-spoofing liaison with a foxy client.
In the anteroom, where cops wait, traumatised by the racket, Phil’s human secretary (a game Maya Rudolph) can only stall them with indulgent shrugs. From this point – it’s significantly before the halfway mark – we’re on a downward slope to listlessness and anticlimax.
The more the film stretches for its “edgy” shocks, the more it gets paid back in groans. It’s a telling sign that it limps to a close after barely 80 minutes, with the end credits showing us how the puppeteers did their thing, often dressed head-to-toe in green felt for ease of digital removal.
An uproarious time was had by all, seemingly, on set. But there’s not much of a party here for the rest of us.