Review: The Muppets

By Sean Knight
2 and a half stars **1/2

I was really looking forward to seeing The Muppets.  I wanted to love it.  I have very fond memories of Jim Henson and his wonderful creations as many in my generation do.  It was with great interest that I followed the production of their latest incarnation.  The early buzz on the film had been alarmingly positive, but it did strike me as odd that Frank Oz was not involved and that several people long associated with The Muppets had come out against the film.  I can now see why.  There is such nostalgia involved with the Muppets themselves that I know why people have been gushing about the picture. Many of those same people are going to take this review the wrong way.  I have always loved the Muppets, but they really deserved better than what this movie was able to offer them.

Jason Segel, who is both the writer and the “star” of the film, evidently has a lot of love for the Muppets.  He obviously wanted to bring them back so that a whole new generation could fall in love with them.  Unfortunately, I don’t think Segel knows what really makes the Muppets tick and instead of making a movie primarily about their glorious return, we have to sit through a hackneyed love story featuring him and his girlfriend Amy Adams.  This is the biggest mistake that any Muppet film could make.  People are paying to come and see the Muppets do their thing, not to see some overblown adolescent male pretending to be a Muppet in both his acting and appearance.  The human characters have always been background to the main thrust of the story.  They play side characters.  Or, even when they are the leads, such as with Michael Cain in A Muppet Christmas Carol, they have the Muppets guiding them through the narrative.  The other subplot of The Muppets is about Segel’s Muppet brother, Walter, who grew up loving the Muppets and always wanting to be a part of them.  This story really works and I found Walter to be rather endearing.  I’m not sure that his talent, which is revealed at the end of the film, is anything truly remarkable, but if we are being honest that goes for many of the Muppets. That’s part of what makes them so damn loveable.  If Segel had chosen to focus solely on Walter’s story and the Muppets’ storyline the film would have been much more streamlined.  Segel and Amy Adams’s love story takes up a good fifty percent of the run time.  It is a distraction and a nuisance.

There are, of course, other things to pick on involving the Muppets themselves.  Many of the voices are rather off from what you expect them to be, especially with Fozzie and Miss Piggy.  I think a good deal of this comes from the fact that Frank Oz and others were not involved.  Still, you do get the feeling of what they are supposed to sound like, but it’s still a disappointment for long time fans.  There is also an issue of comedic timing in the middle of the film where gags run too long and shots linger far longer than they should.  This is mostly an issue of editing and could have been easily fixed in post.  It brings about the sense that more often than not the filmmakers simply don’t know how to make a Muppet movie.  The songs are also largely forgettable, with the exception of the opening number, which is catchy and sweet.

The last thirty minutes of The Muppets is when the film truly comes alive.  The Muppets stage a full on recreation of the former Muppet Show and it is pure magic.  Even me, the most cynical of viewers, shed a few tears watching this glorious sequence.  There is a hilarious barbershop quartet of Nirvana’s Smells Like Teen Spirit and a rolling in the aisles chicken version of Cleo Green’s Fuck You all done in chicken speak.  The celebrity cameos here also brought back many a fond memory of past celebrity appearances.  The film clicks into overdrive here to bring memories of the past washing over you and by the time the Muppets revive The Rainbow Connection you will be in childhood heaven.  The last thirty minutes of The Muppets is a convincing plea to revive The Muppet Show and it’s hard to imagine it not being a success.  This is what The Muppets were born to do in the first place.

The Muppets is filled with good intention and some genuine laughs, which is why it breaks my heart that I didn’t love it like so many others did.  Nostalgia can only take you so far and I simply can’t over look the glaring flaws with the film.  People are paying good money to see The Muppets return to the screen and that is what they should be greeted with, not a human driven and, frankly, lame love story that adds nothing to the Muppets catalogue or their former greatness.

The Muppets
Directed By James Bobin
Release Date: November 23, 2011
Runtime: 98 Mins