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, half-puppet 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, puppets saying what they shouldn’t has long held some amusement.
But the humor of The Happytime Murders, a Jim Henson Co., 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 Co., 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.
The Happytime Murders is dispiriting not because it’s crude but because it’s so empty of wit, despite the comic firepower of McCarthy, Maya Rudolph and Elizabeth Banks — a trio not in need of puppet assistance. Yet the film’s clash of cute and coarse makes the toon mash-up Who Framed Roger Rabbit? look comparatively seamless.
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.”