Muppets Most Wanted
finds Jim Henson’s loveable felt-and-fur goofballs up to their usual
good-natured meta trickiness and bountiful warm-hearted silliness. Writer-director
James Bobin, co-writer Nicholas Stoller, and songwriter Bret McKenzie, who
revived the franchise in 2011 with the surprisingly nostalgic and emotional –
but no less gut-bustingly funny – The
Muppets, are upfront about what their new picture is. It’s a sequel with
the Muppets fresh off the success of their last movie setting off on a European
tour where they cross paths with a jewel heist in progress. If that sounds
partly like a riff on 1981’s The Great
Muppet Caper, the original Muppet sequel, it is and the movie owns up to
it, winking right from the start. The opening musical number is “We’re Doing a
Sequel,” a song full of funny barbs at the business of Hollywood and a clear
tip of the hat to Caper’s curtain
raiser “Hey, a Movie!” It’s a movie that loves movies, but loves the Muppets
even more. And that’s irresistible.
In their opening number, which starts right after the
closing number in the last movie, the gang sings about being a “viable
franchise” and preparing what’s technically their “seventh sequel,” warning
that means it’s “not quite as good.” The Muppets are perpetual optimistic
underdogs, lovable misfits who scramble around with manic showbiz energy, eager
to tell you that the show must go on. Their personalities are so agreeably
constant, chaos and order held in perfect, immutable manic amusement. It’s fun
to see them, as performed here by Steve Whitmire, Eric Jacobson, Dave Goelz,
Bill Barretta, David Rudman, Matt Vogel, and Peter Linz, bounce off of each
other in the old ways. Fearless leader Kermit the Frog, exasperated, is always wrangling
Miss Piggy, Fozzie Bear, Gonzo, Animal, and all the others, competing egos and
eccentricities that constantly threaten to derail their variety shows.
As usual, story exists mainly to provide a rigid genre form for
the Muppets to push against, moving through charmingly near-slapdash sequences of jokes and songs. Most
Wanted’s plot involves the world’s greatest criminal mastermind, a
Kermit-lookalike frog named Constantine. He plots to swap places with the
showbiz icon and use the cover of the Muppet tour to burgle museums at every
stop. Most of the movie finds the fake Kermit faking his way through
interactions with the characters we know and love, while the real Kermit plots
to escape a goofy Siberian gulag. Tina Fey plays the warden, snarling, but
softhearted underneath. Fellow prisoners include Ray Liotta and Jemaine Clement
with thick Russian accents and Danny Trejo playing himself. (His description of
his “triple threat” attributes is priceless.) At least the guards and the
prisoners can agree on something, when they sing a song about how their prison
is the best state-funded hotel in all of Russia. Kermit just wants out of
there.
The Muppets gang moves along unaware of the switch for a
while, though some grow suspicious about the changes in their old pal Kermit.
He talks with a gargling vaguely foreign accent now, but their new tour manager
Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais, playing up his shiftiness) assures them their
friend just has a cold. They continue with their plan to stage Muppet Shows in a collection of European
cities, every place an occasion for good culturally specific jokes. In Berlin,
the theater marquee reads “Die Muppets.” Seeing this, Statler and Waldorf wryly
wonder if the reviews are in already or if that’s the suggestion box.
Meanwhile, a French INTERPOL agent (Ty Burrell, with a chewy Clouseau accent)
and Sam the Eagle bumblingly investigate the robberies that seem to be
following the Muppets around.
The impostor storyline allows the franchise a level on which
to comment upon its own evolution. Once more Bobin, Stoller, and McKenzie prove
their love for the Muppets. Their version of these characters is not an exact
recreation. How could it be? The Muppets haven’t been exactly the same since
Jim Henson died, and later when Frank Oz stepped away. No matter how good,
Bobin and his crew are impersonators. But Most
Wanted, like The Muppets before
it, is filled with such affection for the characters and the smart silliness of
Henson’s original vision, we’re better off with these films than none at all,
or, worse yet, soulless profit-driven corporate property perpetuation. It’s a
movie that knows what made the Muppets most lovable and sets out recreating it as
best it can, with love and care. The filmmakers are true to the Muppet spirit
without suffocating their own comic sensibilities in an effort to recreate the
work of the irreplaceable original Muppet artists. The film’s story is resolved
because Muppets are true to themselves and to each other. I’m glad to see their
new stewards are as well.
Muppets Most Wanted is
very good entertainment, loaded up with smart references and broad craziness.
It’s a satisfyingly warm and inviting brand of inspired high/low comedy, a barrage
of puns, vaudeville sketches, dry asides, sloppy slapstick, and cornball dad
humor, with wall-to-wall witty musical numbers, lovable homage, and tickling
satire. There’s also a fleet of random and inspired cameos, a good half of
which kids today won’t get and most are sure to baffle kids of the future. In
other words, it’s a Muppet movie. I had a smile on my face the whole way
through. I wouldn’t have it any other way.
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