How about a film about the existential conundrum of religious faith?

Muppets Most Wanted

(2014)

It’s a funny kind of a way to express one’s love for a property and its characters; spending a disproportionate amount of time on wholly new ones. True, a series shouldn’t stay still, or rest on its laurels, but if the innovation lacks any of the flair and that made it so good in the first place it would be better not to bother. Acknowledging this, as Muppets Most Wanted sort of does several times, can only do so much to affirm the self-referential wit for which the series is famous; it’s only clever to say you’re crappy if you’re actually not. This seventh (theatrical) sequel undoubtedly has its moments, but in many respects it perpetuates the problems of its predecessor rather than remedying them.

Writer-director James Bobin (and co-writer Nicholas Stoller) they immediately face up to the task in hand with the We’re Doing a Sequel song (“It looks like they’ve ordered a sequel, and everybody knows that the sequel’s not quite as good”). But the essential starting point in counteracting this would have been to get rid of Walter, introduced via the last picture’s banal conceit of a character that wanted to join the Muppets. Bobin and Stoller probably didn’t want to admit they got it wrong, so again this dullest of felt fellows eats up screen time that should have been reserved for the many more vibrant players in the Muppet-verse. And again, at one point they very nearly acknowledge that they spent a whole movie getting him to join up, “Maybe even at the expense of other long-standing beloved Muppets”, as Rizzo opines (exit scene right with Robin).

That Walter is ever-present suggests bloody-mindedness on the parts of Bobin and Stoller, however. The plot they come up with this time isn’t necessarily so bad, except we’ve already had The Great Mupper Caper; criminals hijack the Muppet European Tour in order to perpetrate a series of heists. This fosters a brace of cameos and different destinations. Unfortunately, both new characters (human and muppet) fail to capture the lunacy of the series at its best.

Ricky Gervais is perhaps the most irritating comedy actor on the planet, so his smug mug nuzzling up to the Muppets is off-putting in the extreme. He plays tour manager Dominic Badguy, lackey of arch criminal Constantine. The latter, a ringer for Kermit (aside from a prominent mole), escapes from a Siberian gulag and swaps places with the green Muppet. Who finds it’s not easy being incarcerated. It might have been a better bet to go with the Swedish Chef’s suggestion for the sequel (“How about a film about the existential conundrum of religious faith?”)

Much play is made of how no one notices Kermit’s replacement, despite a completely incongruous accent, and such obvious repetitions are Muppet bread-and-butter. But the evil frog fizzles as a character so his interaction with the other Muppets is a one-joke affair that isn’t especially amusing. Kermit fares better in the gulag, with a game Tina Fey as the warden besotted with him and a selection of amusing inmates. There’s Danny Trejo (as Danny Trejo, which given that he really has been inside is particularly on-the-nose) singing (Bret McKenzie’s songs are yet again one of the highlights, although the best track is a cover of Working in a Coal Mine, and fellow Conchord Jermaine Clement perfectly fits into the Muppet world as the Prison King) and Ray Liotta delivery some classic Liotta deadpan.

By far the superior subplot, which hits the nail on the head in offering up Muppet-human interplay at its best, is Sam the Eagle’s CIA agent teaming up Ty Burrell’s Interpol agent Jean Pierre Napoleon. Burrell brings just the right measure of comedic excess (with an appropriately outrageous accent) while stuffy Sam is the straightmuppet. Travelling around in a very tiny car, and indulging running through a series of French stereotypes (Napoleon’s lunch hour lasts six hours) there’s an irresistible balance between not such great sense (“The comedian bear is the Lemur! That is brilliant!”) and sheer idiocy (“The comedian bear is planning on stealing the Tower of London!”)

Cameos include Tom Hiddleston as The Great Escapo, Celine Dion duetting with Miss Piggy, Christopher Waltz as himself , Usher as an usher (“What kind of an usher are you?”) and Zach Galifianakis as a wedding guest (“Well, this is the best Muppet wedding ever!”). There are also some fine gags along the way; Fozzie posing as a bear skin rug, Kermit and Constantine doing the Groucho Marx mirror routine, babies stealing the crown jewels (“Who would suspect babies of stealing the crown jewels. Look at their sweet faces!”), flamingos singing the Macarena, and Fozzie’s response to the news that Badguy has been bribing journalists to write great reviews (“Oh, why didn’t we ever think of that?”)

Rowlf: (Reading the German sign) Die Muppets?

Waldorf: I can’t believe the reviews are out so early.

Statler: Maybe that’s the suggestion box.

Muppet movies are never easy to pull off; their magic is best engineered in TV sketch format, or playing off a recognisable story (Christmas Carol and Treasure Island both work reasonably well). Statler and Waldorf barely get a look in, the same with Gonzo. There’s also an unconvincing moral about cuddly values (“We’re a family”). Muppets Most Wanted is well shot, I’ll give it that, but it’s a “That’ll do” affair, much the way Fierce Creatures wasn’t a worthy re-assemblage of the Wanda team. The new characters are duff (they would have been better off featuring ‘80s Robot prominently instead of Walter, if they had to bring back a new character, but he’s consigned to extra status) and the plot is determinedly unadventurous.

Most Wanted made less than half as much money as its predecessor, which in part suggests The Muppets itself wasn’t up to scratch (nostalgia sold tickets as much as anything) but it’s also indicative of word of mouth. I can’t lay all the blame Gervais, although he’s a blight on any motion picture; Stoller and Bobin’s contributions are persistently patchy. If the rest of the picture were as inspired as the Sam/Burrell scenes, though, this would have been top tier Muppet moviedom.

Comments

No matter how innocent you are, or how hard you try, they’ll find you guilty.

The Wrong Man (1956) (SPOILERS) I hate to say it, but old Truffaut called it right on this one. More often than not showing obeisance to the might of Hitchcock during his career-spanning interview, the French critic turned director was surprisingly blunt when it came to The Wrong Man . He told Hitch “ your style, which has found its perfection in the fiction area, happens to be in total conflict with the aesthetics of the documentary and that contradiction is apparent throughout the picture ”. There’s also another, connected issue with this, one Hitch acknowledged: too much fidelity to the true story upon which the film is based.

Another case of the screaming oopizootics.

Doctor Who Season 14 – Worst to Best The best Doctor Who season? In terms of general recognition and unadulterated celebration, there’s certainly a strong case to be made for Fourteen. The zenith of Robert Holmes and Philip Hinchcliffe’s plans for the series finds it relinquishing the cosy rapport of the Doctor and Sarah in favour of the less-trodden terrain of a solo adventure and underlying conflict with new companion Leela. More especially, it finds the production team finally stretching themselves conceptually after thoroughly exploring their “gothic horror” template over the course of the previous two seasons (well, mostly the previous one).

He’s so persistent! He always gets his man.

Speed (1994) (SPOILERS) It must have been a couple of decades since I last viewed Speed all the way through, so it’s pleasing to confirm that it holds up. Sure, Jan de Bont’s debut as a director can’t compete with the work of John McTiernan, for whom he acted as cinematographer and who recommended de Bont when he passed on the picture, but he nevertheless does a more than competent work. Which makes his later turkeys all the more tragic. And Keanu and Sandra Bullock display the kind of effortless chemistry you can’t put a price tag on. And then there’s Dennis Hopper, having a great old sober-but-still-looning time.

He is a brigand and a lout. Pay him no serious mention.

The Wind and the Lion (1975) (SPOILERS) John Milius called his second feature a boy’s-own adventure, on the basis of the not-so-terrified responses of one of those kidnapped by Sean Connery’s Arab Raisuli. Really, he could have been referring to himself, in all his cigar-chomping, gun-toting reactionary glory, dreaming of the days of real heroes. The Wind and the Lion rather had its thunder stolen by Jaws on release, and it’s easy to see why. As polished as the picture is, and simultaneously broad-stroke and self-aware in its politics, it’s very definitely a throwback to the pictures of yesteryear. Only without the finger-on-the-pulse contemporaneity of execution that would make Spielberg and Lucas’ genre dives so memorable in a few short years’ time.

The game is rigged, and it does not reward people who play by the rules.

Hustlers (2019) (SPOILERS) Sold as a female Goodfellas – to the extent that the producers had Scorsese in mind – this strippers-and-crime tale is actually a big, glossy puff piece, closer to Todd Phillips as fashioned by Lorene Scarfia. There are some attractive performances in Hustlers, notably from Constance Wu, but for all its “progressive” women work male objectification to their advantage posturing, it’s incredibly traditional and conservative deep down.

But everything is wonderful. We are in Paris.

Cold War (2018) (SPOILERS) Pawel Pawlikowski’s elliptical tale – you can’t discuss Cold War without saying “elliptical” at least once – of frustrated love charts a course that almost seems to be a caricature of a certain brand of self-congratulatorily tragic European cinema. It was, it seems “ loosely inspired ” by his parents (I suspect I see where the looseness comes in), but there’s a sense of calculation to the progression of this love story against an inescapable political backdrop that rather diminishes it.

What do they do, sing madrigals?

The Singing Detective (2003) Icon’s remake of the 1986 BBC serial, from a screenplay by Dennis Potter himself. The Singing Detective fares less well than Icon’s later adaptation of Edge of Darkness , even though it’s probably more faithful to Potter’s original. Perhaps the fault lies in the compression of six episodes into a feature running a quarter of that time, but the noir fantasy and childhood flashbacks fail to engage, and if the hospital reality scans better, it too suffers eventually.

They literally call themselves “Decepticons”. That doesn’t set off any red flags?

Bumblebee (2018) (SPOILERS) Bumblebee is by some distance the best Transformers movie, simply by dint of having a smattering of heart (one might argue the first Shia LaBeouf one also does, and it’s certainly significantly better than the others, but it’s still a soulless Michael Bay “machine”). Laika VP and director Travis Knight brings personality to a series that has traditionally consisted of shamelessly selling product, by way of a nostalgia piece that nods to the likes of Herbie (the original), The Iron Giant and even Robocop .

How would Horatio Alger have handled this situation?

Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas (1998) (SPOILERS) Gilliam’s last great movie – The Zero Theorem (2013) is definitely underrated, but I don’t think it’s that underrated – Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas could easily have been too much. At times it is, but in such instances, intentionally so. The combination of a visual stylist and Hunter S Thompson’s embellished, propulsive turn of phrase turns out, for the most part, to be a cosmically aligned affair, embracing the anarchic abandon of Raoul Duke and Doctor Gonzo’s Las Vegas debauch while contriving to pull back at crucial junctures in order to engender a perspective on all this hedonism. Would Alex Cox, who exited stage left, making way for the Python, have produced something interesting? I suspect, ironically, he would have diluted Thompson in favour of whatever commentary preoccupied him at the time (indeed, Johnny Depp said as much: “ Cox had this great material to work with and he took it and he added his own stuff to it ”). Plus

You don’t know anything about this man, and he knows everything about you.

The Man Who Knew Too Much (1956) (SPOILERS) Hitchcock’s two-decades-later remake of his British original. It’s undoubtedly the better-known version, but as I noted in my review of the 1934 film, it is very far from the “ far superior ” production Truffaut tried to sell the director on during their interviews. Hitchcock would only be drawn – in typically quotable style – that “ the first version is the work of a talented amateur and the second was made by a professional ”. For which, read a young, creatively fired director versus one clinically going through the motions, occasionally inspired by a shot or sequence but mostly lacking the will or drive that made the first The Man Who Knew Too Much such a pleasure from beginning to end.

Now In Full Color, with a Happier Ending

Search This Blog