Back in the day when Jim Henson and company were making Muppet movies, the stories of each film often had little or nothing to do with one another. Co-writer/director James Bobin’s new film, Muppets Most Wanted, is very explicitly a direct sequel to his 2011 hit, The Muppets, though—so much so that it opens immediately after The Muppets calls cut on its final scene, and then it goes straight into a musical number about how audiences liked The Muppets so much that the studio has now ordered them to do a sequel. At first this approach seemed to be a welcoming one for those of us who were fans of the Muppets’ return to the big screen from a few years ago, but after the opening song starts making Meta jokes about how the sequel is never quite as good as the original, the feeling that maybe this movie isn’t going to be able to live up to expectations starts creeping in pretty quickly.
The story this time around is kind of a heist film, kind of a road trip movie, and kind of a prison break flick. The basic gist is that a duo of evildoers played by Ricky Gervais and a Kermit the Frog lookalike named Constantine have hatched a plan to steal the Crown Jewels and to frame the Muppets for the crime. The particulars of the plan involve replacing Kermit with Constantine in the performing troupe, leaving Kermit to rot away in a Russian gulag, hitching along with the gang on a tour of Europe that will allow them to steal a series of priceless art pieces that have a series of items necessary for the acquiring of the Crown Jewels hidden in them (National Treasure style), and then eventually ending the tour in London, where the climactic robbery will take place. That description kind of makes the film sound more intense and involved than it really is though. At its heart, Muppets Most Wanted is still just a silly movie where the Muppets and a handful of human guest stars engage themselves in absurdist hijinx. You know, for kids.
What’s good here? Bobin and his co-writer Nicholas Stoller have a lot of experience making comedies, so the film is full of chock full of gags that land. The jokes range from the typical sort of hacky schlock that you’ve come to expect from Fozzie Bear, all the way up to high-minded references to The Seventh Seal. Constantine’s penchant for needlessly blowing up everything he encounters will have you chucking; Tina Fey’s character making a vague reference to Lockout will leave you smirking and shaking your head in bewilderment. There’s something in the humor for everyone. Seeing as Bret McKenzie is back to do the music, the songs are all pretty charming and fun as well. There’s nothing here quite as strong as ‘Life’s a Happy Song’ or ‘Man or Muppet’ from the first film, so there’s probably not going to be any Oscar wins in this movie’s future, but whenever the first couple notes of a McKenzie-penned tune start up, you can rest assured that good times are ahead.
What doesn’t work so much is how married to the heist plot the film gets. It’s not that it spends a lot of time explaining its story’s particulars, because it doesn’t, it’s that it spends a lot of time with Constantine and Gervais’ Dominic Badguy character as they’re scheming and stealing things, and nobody goes to a Muppet movie to watch Ricky Gervais and a felt frog who isn’t named Kermit hang out. As things play out, the Muppet crew ends up becoming pretty thoroughly marginalized in their own movie.
The other main plot with Kermit being locked up in a gulag is so good that you almost don’t mind the focus being taken off of the ensemble though. He’s imprisoned with a cast of characters that includes Ray Liotta, Danny Trejo, and professional wrestling’s resident Leprechaun, Hornswoggle (Dylan Posti), they get overseen by an impossibly Russian prison guard played by Tina Fey, and the results of this collaboration are every bit as entertaining as you’d hope. If Muppets Most Wanted could have been reimagined as a Follow That Bird type movie where the focus was split pretty evenly between Kermit being imprisoned in this jail and his Muppet pals hitting the road to search for him, it could have been something really special. As is, it’s a pretty entertaining movie that probably overestimates just how much Ricky Gervais the public wanted to see in a film that was advertised as being about the Muppets.
That’s not to say that Gervais is bad here though. He’s funny enough—he just gets overexposed in a way that he shouldn’t have been, and he was way more likable back when he was fat and impossibly annoying than he is now, when he’s gotten himself into Hollywood shape and is playing characters who are misguided but still relatable. Say what you will about the evils of typecasting, but nobody wants to like David Brent. The other two main human characters, played by Fey and Ty Burrell, both fare pretty well though. Burrell plays an Interpol agent who is little more than a series of European (okay, French) stereotypes on the page, but he’s just so effortlessly doofy that you laugh at everything he does anyway. And Fey, she’s playing a ridiculously broad character who is essentially just a thick Russian accent and a series of Meta quips, but she’s so damned talented that she still absolutely kills, even when doing schtick. I may be alone in this, but I could watch an entire movie where her stupid character and Kermit run through a series of romantic comedy cliches, and I would only complain about it minimally.
To get back to the movie as it exists though, Muppets Most Wanted is strong but not great. It’s nowhere near the low point of the first batch of Muppet movies, Muppets From Space, and I’d say it’s pretty much on par with the second string of that first batch of features, which I guess would be The Muppets Take Manhattan. It doesn’t quite live up to the cream of the Muppet crop, which I consider to be the original The Muppet Movie and Bobin’s The Muppets though. Those two have an emotional heart and a manic originality that separates them from the rest of the pack and makes them the sorts of things that will get passed down from parent to child. Muppets Most Wanted, comparatively, seems pretty content just to be fairly funny and to include some toe-tapping songs. Given the almost identical crews that worked on both, it would stand to reason that the missing element keeping this one from getting to that next level is The Muppets screenwriter Jason Segel, whose passion for the property got it revived in the first place, and whose open wound vulnerability made The Muppets, and his previous movie, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, resonant beyond just being comedic romps. It’s a shame that he couldn’t be tempted back to get involved with this sequel, but Muppets Most Wanted wound up being an enjoyable entry into the Muppet franchise nonetheless.
