Review: The Happytime Murders

There is maybe one laugh to be had from the idea of children's puppets doing adult things and The Happytime Murders can't even get that right. It's not that a movie that features a puppet octopus "milking" a puppet cow somehow isn't depraved enough - it's that this movie acts like everyone watching it is totally invested in the idea of puppets as symbols of child-like innocence and wonder, and so putting puppets in adult situations is automatically hilarious. 

It's not. It's amazing how much is it not.

Most of the previous movies about children's characters doing adult things - Who Framed Roger Rabbit, Team America, and so on - got at least some mileage out of putting their children's characters in then-current mainstream adult movie genres. Unfortunately in 2018 there are no mainstream adult movie genres: making a puppet movie about superheroes would just be a regular superhero movie.

So the story is fresh out of 1987: ex-cop turned PI (what, no “puppet investigator” joke?) Phil Phillips (puppeteer Bill Barretta, who also provides the voice) finds himself tangled up in a string of murders seemingly targeting the former cast members of hit puppet sitcom The Happytime Gang, and is forced to work with his former partner Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) – the cop who had him thrown off the force.

This buddy cop plot is the strongest part of the film, which shouldn't really be surprising as it's played absolutely straight. The whole "we've got to solve this mystery and also we hate each other" thing is pleasingly retro, McCarthy is decent as a pissed-off cop, Barretta has just the right amount of world-weariness for a worn down PI, and while the mystery does contain zero surprises it does keep the film moving along.

Oh wait, this is a movie about puppets having sex and getting their heads blown off; who cares about the plot?  Unfortunately this film, despite being made by Jim "Muppet" Henson's son, has access to a grand total of zero much-loved muppet characters and so has to come up with a crazy new bunch of puppets for us to care about. Only it doesn't bother: this film has put all its chips on betting that the audience will find hilarious the idea of a puppet - any puppet - doing adult things. This is not a good bet.

The result is a steady stream of puppets we are never given a single reason to care about being killed in briefly amusing (that is to say, graphic) fashion, while others do drugs (sugar is puppet drugs) and have sex, which is just two puppets flailing up against each other so don't get too excited. But you do get to see a puppet vagina in a Basic Instinct parody that turns out to be essential to solving the mystery. Well, not "you" - you're never going to see this movie.

It's a film full of characters we don't care about doing things we don't care about while making jokes that aren't funny (the old "asshole says what" joke is done multiple times like Wayne's World never happened) in between action sequences that aren't exciting: you'll have more fun putting your hand in a sock.

- Anthony Morris

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