Ill-considered ‘The Happytime Murders’ an X-rated Muppets

It’s almost reassuring that in today’s often sanitized, assembly-line mainstream moviemaking that a film can be as crude, as off-brand and as bad as “The Happytime Murders.” Almost.

Starring Melissa McCarthy in a seedy, half-human, halfpuppet Los Angeles, “The Happytime Murders” is an R-rated, adult-themed puppet adventure from Brian Henson, son of Jim. That in itself isn’t terrible. The elder Henson himself had adult aspirations for the Muppets. (They were, awkwardly, a part of the first season of “Saturday Night Live.”) From Edgar Bergen’s dummies to “Avenue Q” to “Team America” the thrill of puppets saying what they shouldn’t has long held some amusement.

But the humor of “The Happytime Murders,” a Jim Henson Company production featuring a new species of Muppet dubbed Miskreants, is so stale that I suspect even those bitter balcony critics Statler and Waldorf wouldn’t bother heckling it. “Happytime Murders” has been promoted as “No Sesame, All Street,” a tagline that resulted in a lawsuit from the Sesame Workshop (it was dismissed). And Henson (who directed “The Muppet Christmas Carol” and “Muppet Treasure Island”) seems to think the film can coast by purely on cheap giggles from puppets browsing for porn, snorting glitter through Twizzlers and being blown into clouds of cotton.

It can’t. The result is a low point for the Jim Henson Company, a dispiriting and unmitigated misfire whose only upside is that it shows a sloppy, ill-considered movie can still get made, despite today’s quality controls.

It’s all such a painfully far cry from the heights of the Henson empire. As Rowlf the Dog once sang, “I hope that something better comes along.”