Reviewed by Lamar Kukuk
11/27/11
I was but a wee tot during
the original five-year run of The Muppet Show (from 1976-1981, a
fact that we’ll get back to), but like just about everyone else then and
since, I fell in love with Kermit the Frog, Fozzie Bear, Miss Piggy, the
Great Gonzo and the dozens of other wacky hand puppets who populated its
crazy world. Like the Toy Story movies, the Muppets are notable
in being created for kids but containing almost overwhelming levels of
adult pathos: Kermit the Frog is essentially a green sock and the
dude can sometimes act circles around Oscar winners! One thing I
also remember as a child was how disappointed I was by The Muppet Movie,
The Great Muppet Caper and The Muppets Take Manhattan, the
trilogy of late-70’s and early 80’s movies that brought Jim Henson’s creations
to the big screen. After his death, the brand was revived for a sensational
big-screen outing: The Muppet Christmas Carol is probably
the best thing to wear the Muppet name, and the follow-up Muppet Treasure
Island was also a cute family adventure. But a return to the
“real” world of the puppets, Muppets from Space was an artistic
wash-out and the characters have been absent from the big screen ever since.
Now, with much fanfare, they return with The Muppets. A passion
project for actor/co-writer Jason Segel, The Muppets seems to have
all the right pieces for a hilarious, emotionally rich comeback, telling
a story of the washed-up vaudevillian TV stars having to stage a comeback
to save their beloved theater from demolition. But just about everything
about the movie is off: the humor ranges from OK to lame and the
crazy puppets are mostly kept on the backburner in favor of three new characters
including a wishy-washy new Muppet named Walter. The Muppets
has its moments, but most of them come before a protracted thuddish climax
that put me in the unfortunate position of saying “You know, maybe the
Muppets ARE past it.”
Walter (voice of Peter Linz)
grew up in Smalltown, USA, where, how can I put this, everyone else was
a human being. But tiny felt Walter grew up with only his increasingly
big brother Gary (Jason Segel) to lean on, and his TV heroes The Muppets
for inspiration. Now, in 2010, Gary and his girlfriend Mary (Amy
Adams) are going on a trip to Los Angeles for their 10th Anniversary, and
he brings the little guy along so he can live his dream of seeing Muppet
Studios. But the tourist trap studio has fallen into disrepair and
Walter sneaks into Kermit’s old office where he overhears oilman Tex Richman
(Chris Cooper) closing a deal that’ll allow him to bulldoze the Muppet
theater and drill for the oil he knows is under it unless the Muppets can
raise ten million dollars to buy him out by Friday. Walter tells
Gary and Mary and the three of them set off to find Kermit the Frog (Steve
Whitmire) and let him know. Kermit’s a shadow of his former self,
living in a broken-down mansion with a talking 80’s Robot (Matt Vogel)
and memories of his heyday with the since-broken-up Muppet troupe.
But he resolves to try to save the theater with a bold Muppet telethon
and gets the old gang back together except for Miss Piggy (Eric Jacobson),
who is still bitter about her breakup with Kermit years before. It
takes a last-minute opening in the schedule of a sympathetic TV Executive
(Rashida Jones) to give them their break, but even then they can’t go on
without a celebrity host. Mary has had just about enough of being
the third wheel in Gary and Walter’s relationship, the little Muppet struggles
to discover a talent that would allow him to join his heroes on the stage,
and Tex Richman will stop at nothing to make sure The Muppet Telethon is
a failure. Can anything save The Muppet Theater?
There’s a lot about The
Muppets that’s OK: there’s some OK songs, best among them one
titled “Man or Muppet”, Segel, Adams and Cooper are OK in their roles,
although only Adams avoids the occasional flop sweat that always seems
to afflict actors trying to keep up with the puppets, it’s nice to see
the beloved Muppet characters again and there are enough good jokes to
keep things going for a while. The Muppet Performers do their usual
good work (although Jacobson has a lot more luck taking over Miss Piggy
from Frank Oz than Fozzie, who sounds all wrong), Jones is solid as the
frazzled TV executive, and Cooper has a rap number that’s a real show-stopper
(probably the only thing in the movie that’s above average). But
every single Muppet has had better material and more resonant plot lines
in other movies, and the script Segel co-wrote with Nicolas Stoller can’t
quite pin down any of its elements.
What’s the deal with Walter?
There don’t seem to be any other felt puppet people in his world, so why
doesn’t anyone say “Gee, you seem to me to be a long-lost Muppet.”
He’s not a very likeable presence, either, a self-pitying co-dependent
drag on his loyal brother who’s even tentative and wussy once he finally
finds his way to the Muppet Theater where he belongs. Of course,
the script desperately needs him to find a place “among his own kind” to
get out of the way of Gary and Mary, and the whole dynamic makes it hard
to root for anyone. While the movie takes pains to be self-referential,
it doesn’t establish a real world to wink at: parts of the film occur
inside a movie musical snow globe of sunny perfection and others seem set
in our real 2011 except for the part where there are living puppets.
Similarly murky is what it
means for the Muppets to have fallen out of favor and, in turn, to come
back. They were stars of a network TV show and several movies, spawned
oodles of merchandise in their day, and yet no one seems to have any nostalgia
at all for them until they miraculously win everyone back over in two hours
before a sputtering start-and-stop ending that has them winning, then losing,
then winning again, then losing and, well, you know…
All of which is no worse
than most made-by-committee, focus grouped blockbusters except for one
key problem: the Muppet Telethon the characters put on for the bulk
of the third act is awful. Simply unwatchable. Seeming to believe
The Muppet Show contained no pop cultural satires or continuing
sketches, the movie instead gives us nothing but those bits where crazy
chickens sang pop songs that were the filler that padded out the show with
70’s weirdness. And yet we’re to believe that a public that’s forgotten
the Muppets would discover them anew through this absolute low point of
their catalog. The way an initially empty theater fills up with happy
patrons and, well, I won’t spoil what happens at the end but it stretches
credulity beyond the breaking point, besides suggesting that it’s more
important for the Muppets to be famous than to be happy, which, I suppose,
is the point of all media pitched at kids these days. Truth be told,
I found it more than a little disingenuous to get a movie about the sin
of not loving The Muppets made by the multi-billion dollar corporate empire
that reaps the rewards every time we buy something with Kermit on it.
And another thing, the movie
clings to a belief that the Muppets are anachronisms of the 80’s that included
New Coke, Molly Ringwald and "We Built this City", by which time their
initial stardom had long faded. And it’s typical of the low imagination
level of most of the gags that Kermit’s (admittedly funny) talking 80’s
robot is named… 80’s Robot. I will give it this much, the celebrity
cameos are above average, with entertaining turns by Alan Arkin, Emily
Blunt, Zack Galifianakis and others, although the truest words spoken in
the movie might come from a vaguely dazed Selena Gomez, who informs us
that she has no idea who the Muppets are, but her agent told her to come.
So, yeah, The Muppets
is threadbare, doesn’t make plot or thematic sense and does a mediocre
job reimagining icons of the past for the present: what kids blockbuster
can’t say all those things? But it’s curiously restrained, not all
that funny, and ultimately left me cold. I kept waiting for it to
catch fire, but it actually keeps getting progressively worse until that
eye-rolling climax. And I love those puppets, so I expected a lot
more. Of course, there’s never been a more than adequate movie about
the Muppets as opposed to simply starring them, so maybe next time they
should consider Muppet Hamlet. Now THAT would be funny…
P.S. Theatrical showings
of The Muppets are preceeded by an extremely funny Toy Story
short that probably has more laughs than the 100-odd-minute movie that
follows it. |
