Muppets Most Wanted

Muppets Most Wanted is James Bobin's and Nicholas Stoller’s follow-up to 2011's The Muppets, their critically acclaimed and commercially successful feature film relaunch of Jim Henson’s beloved characters. The new movie’s opening musical number declares, tongue firmly in cheek, that a sequel is never as good as the original. It's a mildly amusing line that fits the Muppets' self-aware, self-deprecating style of humor, but it doesn't absolve the film from failing to live up to its predecessor. That's a real problem, because The Muppets wasn’t all that good or original to begin with. As soon as Muppets Most Wanted begins, it's apparent that whatever magic Bobin, Stoller, songwriter Bret McKenzie, and co-writer/star Jason Siegel (who is not involved in this picture) were able to recapture in 2011 has dissipated significantly. Muppets Most Wanted shares many of The Muppets' shortcomings and they are more glaring in the absence of the previous film's novelty and nostalgia value.

When Disney set out to reestablish the Muppets franchise and restore the diminished property to its rightful place in the annals of comedy history, many fans feared that Siegel and Stoller (grads of the Judd Apatow school of lazy, stoner, man-child humor) and Bobin and McKenzie (director and co-creator of the ultra-hip Flight of the Concords) were the wrong choice for the job. As it turned out, those apprehensions were unwarranted. While The Muppets didn’t fully capture all of the things I love about the characters, it got a lot right, and it certainly surpassed any other Muppet project since Henson's death. The principle flaw of The Muppets was an unearned sentimentality--an inability for heart and soul of the puppet characters to transcend their self-mocking, meta approach to storytelling. That elusive tone was the magic ingredient in most of Henson’s work and its conspicuous absence since his death has stuck out as awkwardly as Steve Whitmire’s imperfect performances of the specific characters Henson performed. This inability to authentically tug and your heartstrings while simultaneously ridiculing anything sappy or saccharin gets magnified in the new movie. Muppets Most Wanted plays like an extended exercise in hip, family-friendly comedy, rather than an engaging emotional experience.

Bobin and Stoller devise a promising structural approach for milking more nostalgia out of Muppets in this film, which lifts the '60s-era European heist picture format of the original Muppet movie sequel, 1981’s The Great Muppet Caper. However, they don’t seem to realize what a golden opportunity they’ve created, and they blow their big chances at delivering the kind of old-school Muppet material audiences surely want to see. The storyline involves a sinister scheme by a nefarious promoter (Ricky Gervais) to use the Muppet Show, now on a tour of European cities, as a cover for breaking into art museums. But the filmmakers are so fixated on advancing their contrived storyline that they all but ignore their biggest trump card: the hilarious stage acts that were so central to the success of “The Muppet Show” on television. Every time the film shows the Muppets performing live for an audience, it's painfully obvious that the filmmakers neither intended nor expected these routines to work as stand-alone pieces, and time and again the action cuts away from the stage as soon as possible to return to the story of the robberies. Does anyone really think that the audience for this movie is more interested in plot mechanics than in seeing the Muppets sing, dance, and do comedy? Nearly every opportunity for an unforgettable and inventive “Muppet Show” moment is wasted, as are all the European guest stars “featured” in these sequences. Canadian songstress Céline Dion, who sings a duet with Miss Piggy, is the one cameo performer who is used well.

The filmmakers do make one smart choice: for the first time in one of these movies, a Muppet, not a human actor, plays the principle villain. The antagonist in Muppets Most Wanted is Kermit’s doppelganger Constantine, an evil Russian frog (how unexpectedly timely) with Gervais serving as a mere henchman. Constantine (performed by Matt Vogel) isn’t quite substantial enough to carry the film, but he does score a lot of laughs, as do the other human stars. Tina Fey is winningly paired with Kermit as the head guard in the Russian gulag where our hero frog spends much of his screen time. Ty Burrell plays an Inspector Clueso-type Interpol investigator partnered with Sam the Eagle, playing a buttoned-up CIA man, in an amusing and recurring send-up of the culture clash between America and Europe. Fey, Gervais, and Burrell help keep the plot from becoming tedious, but Muppets Most Wanted shines brightest during its delightful musical numbers, which are irresistible if not especially memorable. Songwriter McKenzie crafts broad parodies of musical genres that also function as perfectly serviceable examples of the styles they're satirizing. These are the type of clever, enjoyable numbers that all modern musicals should have but exceedingly few do, and it's on the strength of these tunes and Bobin’s staging of them that the film earns its three-star rating. 

2011's Muppets set a fairly low bar for its sequel. Muppets Most Wanted only needed to be entertaining and profitable enough to keep the franchise alive for its fans, both old and new. I suppose it achieves that unambitious goal. But once again the Muppets seem in danger of slipping back into semi-dormant obscurity.