I have no idea how to review Muppets Most Wanted without sounding like I’m nit-picking and looking for problems with a film that is perfectly adequate for its target audience, but will likely fail to entirely satisfy those that reveled in the nostalgia of The Muppets in 2011. In comparison to the last film, Muppets Most Wanted didn’t work nearly as well for me, though I know I approached it from a different place. I wasn’t as excited to see it and my experience watching it reflected that lack of enthusiasm.
Muppets Most Wanted picks up exactly where the first film left off, panning down the backs of two stand ins meant to represent Jason Segel and Amy Adams, neither of which reprise their roles here. In fact, they aren’t even mentioned. Even Walter, the puppet whose dream was to join the Muppets, saving Kermit, Piggy and Fozzie from obscurity in the first movie, is pretty much an afterthought here. Fact is, the opening moments remind us the first movie was just that, a movie, and this its sequel, and a sequel more out of necessity than a want to see a good story told from a fond and loving place for Kermit and the gang.
The gist of the story is the Muppets are going on a world tour, led by their new manager Dominic Badguy (a toned down Ricky Gervais). As Dominic’s last name indicates, his motivations aren’t pure and if you really wanted to be cynical you could say the same for the screenplay, co-written by director James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller, the latter having also co-wrote the original with Jason Segel.
We soon meets the film’s chief antagonist, Constantine, a Kermit the Frog look-a-like (outside of a giant mole on the right side of his face) that has just broken out of a Siberian prison. Kermit is soon mistaken as the escaped criminal and sent back to the Gulag while the evil frog and Dominic use the Muppets’ globe-hopping world tour to rob museums at each stop with their primary target being the Crown Jewels in London.
Where The Muppets seemed like a movie born out of something more than the studio’s desire for another Muppets movie, Muppets Most Wanted is the exact opposite. The plot seems like a compromise reached by a think tank that didn’t even really want to make the movie in the first place. It feels like they settled, called it “good enough” and went into production.
The film features cameos from the likes of Lady Gaga and Tony Bennett that make no sense and additional members of the human cast include Ty Burrell as Interpol agent Jean Pierre Napoleon and Tina Fey as Nadya, a Kermit the Frog-loving prison guard.
There are moments where I laughed quietly to myself, but never felt an overall sense of joy when seeing these characters back together. I’ll always like Animal and hearing him grunt “Bad Frog!” is enough to make me smile. Beaker is great and the Swedish Chef never gets old, but these are mild, humorous distractions within a film that never really moves the dial. The songs never pop like they did in the first film where it felt like revisiting the Muppets was an event whereas this feels like an inevitability. The sense we are watching something special is never carried over as even the opening song spells out this is a sequel. Even a lyric in this opening recognizes sequels are rarely as good as the first, setting us up for disappointment before the movie even begins.
Perhaps I’ve outgrown the Muppets. Perhaps nostalgia has a life span. Or, perhaps Muppets Most Wanted isn’t a very good movie. I can’t really say for sure as the first two options depend on factors outside of my control. As much as we bring our biases to movies, we also bring a level of expectation and history that even we can’t understand sometimes. Muppets Most Wanted felt like a Muppets movie, but at the same time I was asking myself, “Why isn’t this doing it for me?” and when starting this review I wanted to make clear I don’t have any specific problems with this film outside of my own lack of interest.
In such a situation is it even fair to write a review? Perhaps not, but it is my job. What I can say is I think kids will enjoy the movie, but then again my experience was conflicted on that front as well. With about 20 minutes to go, the young boy sitting behind me whispered to his mother, “I don’t like this movie.” Walking out of the movie, however, a young girl asked her mother, “Can we buy that when it comes out?” Her mother replied, “It was really funny wasn’t it?” “Yeah, but we’re going to buy it right?” The film will have its fans and its detractors. I guess I find myself somewhere in the middle, not an easy place to be when you’re trying to reach a certain word count.
