Review of Muppets Most Wanted (2014) by Robert L — 09 Apr 2014

Actors Assemble.

It's time to put on makeup, it's time to dress up right, its time to get things started on the Muppets Sequel tonight! So I suppose the reel question is will it be sensational? Inspirational? Calibrational?

So here they are, they have returned to us, The Muppets in a sequel which has the premise of being bigger, stronger and better than the original, the only problem is, it isn't. The Muppets Most wanted just flat out isn't as unique, satirical or clever as the original movie, sure it's ambitious but that doesn't make a movie good, it just makes it ambitious.

I think the problem that The Muppets: Most Wanted suffers mostly from is that it's a victim of it's own success, in the first movie it was all about getting the guys back together, working as one and reforming, it was classical and nostalgic, whilst being full of the snap comedy that everyone loved The Muppets for, but now in the Most Wanted the problem is where do you go from here? How do you expand on the reunited crew? Well you do what any series does when it runs out of ideas, you take the band on tour!

Now this might not sound like it's as big a problem as it is, but one of the things that made you enjoy the Muppets so much was stability, you knew what you were getting when you went through the doors, in Most Wanted it's a lot less focused than anything before it, however there is a much larger problem looming round the corner .

That problem is this, for a film called The Muppets, it really marginalises almost every Muppet you care to name, Gonzo a founder of the cast and an integral part of the first movie here is reduced to a single thought tagged with perhaps 10 lines total. The only people who get any kind of weight in the movie are Kermit and Constantine, Sam the Eagle, Walter, Miss Piggy and Fozzy. Everyone else just kind of becomes one big mass of fluff and puppetry.

There was something beautifully macabre and cool about how a lot of actors made cameos in The Muppets movie, how they had momentary roles that were totally obscure and there was something genius about it all too, there was something cute about Dave Ghoal being in a band with Animal. The Muppets: Most Wanted takes the idea of cameo's to the extremes, every opportunity the film gets it throws in another random A or B list celebrity from the pile and puts them on screen for a scene for no justifiable reason, it gets to a point where the whole thing feels... gratuitous, sure have a handful here or their just to keep us smiling, but when the humans outnumber the Muppets? Something is going very wrong indeed.

I think that's what makes The Muppets: Most Wanted feel so lacklustre it's a film that never quite balances anything properly, somehow even the songs feel misjudged when placed up next to it's predecessor, and it hurts me to say that because I wanted to like The Muppets more, I wanted to enjoy myself fully, but I just can't escape the fact that it's just not that good.

It's also disappointing that the film placed most of it's best jokes in the trailer, I would expect this from other Hollywood fair but The Muppets? The film that gave us the phrase "Maniacal laugh!", there are no such highlights in Most Wanted.

It's strange to think how badly everything sits together in Most Wanted, it's as if someone took everything you loved and changed it just enough to not be enjoyable but not be unpleasant either.

The Muppets: Most Wanted is a film that feels both fumbled and overall awkward, it's a shame that such a great franchise has been so horribly misjudged. People who shouldn't see it: The Lovers. The Dreamers. You.