By Jonathan Fisher, January 20, 2012
The Muppets have always held a bizarre place in the public psyche. A little too twisted to be entirely for children, and a little too PG to be directly targeted at adults, the Muppets have managed to gain a faithful, loving following in both demographics. They've also been inordinately successful in attracting celebrities to their cause -- The Muppet Show was all about having a special celebrity guest each week, and their other productions often turned out some fine work from the best thespians around. A Muppet Christmas Carol is, oddly enough, one of the best adaptations of the Dickens novel yet produced, and Michael Caine is possibly the best Scrooge we've seen. So this element of celebrity collaboration and name-dropping remains in The Muppets, which features so many blink-and-you'll-miss it cameos from notable actors that it's the least the film-makers can do to insert a Rolodex joke.
This newest movie retains the self-reflexivity and twisted humour that made all of the previous instalments so lovable. This film follows the plight of Walter (voiced by Peter Linz), the world's biggest Muppet fan, born into a human family who don't seem to even notice that he's a Jim Henson puppet. Despite his very close relationship with his brother Gary (Jason Segel), Walter appears stuck in arrested development (quite literally -- he hasn't grown an inch since about the age of 6), unsure of his place in the world. After Gary and his girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams) take him to Los Angeles to tour Muppet studios, Walter discovers that -- horror of horrors! -- the world has forgotten about the Muppets, their studio is almost completely run down, and a transparently evil oil baron named Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) is planning to buy the land and drill underneath it for oil. All of this is inevitable... Unless, of course, the Muppets find a way to raise $10 million to save their theatre. Thus, Walter and his brother embark on a mission to reunite all of the Muppet crew for one... last... show.
It's a very familiar premise, but what The Muppets lacks in narrative creativity, it makes up for in its knack for absurdist comedy. The tone of this film is so bizarre that one just has to laugh. Jason Segel is really the only human actor who could pull off the role of the wholesome and naive Gary, and all of the Muppets retain their spirit from the earlier, admittedly more classic films (A Muppet Christmas Carol, Muppet Treasure Island, among others). Chris Cooper, one of the finest actors around, lends his considerable talent to Tex Richman, who has many of the best lines and certainly one of the strangest, most hilarious songs.
Narratively, this film is a bit of a shambles, but it gets away with it because it knows it. The plot moves at a fair clip, with plenty of convenient twists and turns that beggar belief to the point of annoyance -- annoyance that subsides once the characters make a clever joke about the fact that they're in a movie about themselves. It's all very meta, in an endearing rather than irritating way.
The Muppets harks back to the kind of comedy that was made pretty regularly in the 1980s. With its completely absurdist sensibility, and in-built goodwill towards all of the characters, it shouldn't be any surprise that the world has welcomed the Muppets back in a big way. This edition of the Muppets is not as hilarious, creative, or consistently on the money as a few of the other Muppet adventures, but the spirit and humour have remained intact.
The Muppets Trailer:
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