Muppets most wanting
What starts off as an amusing idea quickly crosses the line from lewd to crude
The Happytime Murders is brought to you by the letters “F” and “U,” as well as the letter “A,” the latter of which is often heard at the front of a word ending in “hole.”
Let me spell this out for you, especially if you’re a parent who may understandably mistake this for a Sesame Street detective parody. The movie has Muppet-like characters, voiced by some of the Sesame Street actors (including former Elmo puppeteer Kevin Clash). It’s directed by Brian Henson, son of the late Muppets creator Jim Henson.
Don’t be fooled. Heed the accurate adline: “No Sesame. All Street” — and it’s a very dirty street.
What starts off as an amusing idea quickly crosses the line from lewd to crude, with sex jokes both visual and verbal that don’t improve with repetition.
Remember Sharon Stone’s infamous leg-crossing interrogation scene from Basic Instinct? It’s graphically imitated by a puppet perp and referred to by other characters, in case we didn’t get it the first time.
The set-up for The Happytime Murders is of an alternative Los Angeles where humans and sentient puppets (they aren’t called Muppets here) uncomfortably coexist. Humans treat puppets with extreme racist disdain, to the point where there’s a thriving trade in puppet body parts that have been illegally poached.
Some puppets know how to take care of them- selves. These include Phil Philips (Bill Barretta), a disgraced former police detective who now toils as a private investigator, with a bottle habit and a bad attitude. His felt exterior is blue but his insides are jet black. “If you’re a puppet, you’re screwed,” he grouses via voice-over narration.
Phil was the first puppet to become an LAPD cop. He made many big arrests alongside his equally attitudinal human partner, Det. Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy). But something happened that turned them from comrades into enemies and bounced him off the police beat.
They’re forced to work together again, with mutual foul-mouthed resentment, to crack the case of serial murders involving cast members of
The Happytime Gang, an old TV show of jesting puppets and their human sidekick Jenny (Elizabeth Banks), Phil’s ex-girlfriend.
(Phil has another connection to the case that soon becomes apparent.)
The joke works well enough at first, the way a parody often does on Saturday Night Live, at least until it goes on for too long. ( SNL alumna Maya Rudolph is here, playing Phil’s resourceful secretary Bubbles.)
But the profanity and sex jokes are relentless, and the gun violence is more graphic than you might expect — watching a puppet’s head being blown off isn’t funny hah-hah.
The movie falls prey to McCarthy’s habit of over-reaching. Her character Connie doesn’t just have a foul mouth, she also has an addiction to sugar that is taken to heroin-junkie extremes.
The flat-footed detective plot credited to Todd Berger and Dee Austin Robertson doesn’t help.
There’s little of the wit — not to mention the musical inspiration — that Henson previously displayed with The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. (McCarthy’s husband Ben Falcone, who directs and cowrites many of her lowbrow movies, takes a production credit here and also plays one of the humans.) Comparisons with other adult-themed puppet productions such as Broadway’s Ave- nue Q and the movie Team America: World Police similarly leave The Happytime Murders wanting.
Watching it is like being hit in the head over and over with a hammer made of felt; eventually it’s going to sting.
Fortunately, we don’t have to endure any indignities happening to such beloved Sesame Street figures as Big Bird and Kermit the Frog, who are nowhere in sight.
Although Kermit could offer some upbeat life advice to the misguided makers of The Happytime Murders: “Just because you haven’t found your talent yet, doesn’t mean you don’t have one.”