The plot: Private investigator Phil Phillips (Bill Barretta), a former member of the Los Angeles police department, has to deal with a lot of prejudice from the humans in the neighbourhood. However, he will need to put that aside and team up with his former partner Det. Connie (Melissa McCarthy) to track down a murderer who appears to be targeting the retired cast of 90's puppet sitcom 'The Happytime Gang'.
Barretta is damn good as our lead, rather
obvious Sam Spade impression notwithstanding, giving the character a suitably
gruff and withered timbre that makes everything from his cheesy voice-over
narration to his not-so-subtle jabs at the humans around him ring true.
McCarthy may be stuck with a few too many tomboy jokes to sit completely well
here, but as the aggressive, drug-addled and racist police officer, it’s a
character that fits McCarthy’s more vulgar tendencies quite nicely.
Maya Rudolph
(must be a package deal with McCarthy by this point), fits into her noir
archetype well enough, in this case the bubbly secretary to our grizzled
private eye, and Joel McHale as a commandeering FBI agent largely exists as the
brunt of occasionally-cringey jokes, something he handles as well as can be
expected. Elizabeth Banks as the token human member of The Happytime Gang is
good enough, if nothing all that special, Leslie David Baker as the police
lieutenant hits that note adequately, and the myriad of puppeteers behind the
fuzzier members of the cast all do very well at bringing this rather oddball
world to life.
Which brings us to the technical side of things, and quite
frankly, this is a pretty solid effort given both the pedigree of the Jim
Henson Company and the rather ambitious goal of the production at large. Sure,
the idea of combining human and puppet acting isn’t anything new for the
Hensons, but considering the tone this time around, it ticks all the boxes
required. The puppets hold up to the Muppet standard for character design, with
a lot of natural-looking movement afforded them by the hands behind the scenes.
Not only that, the merging of the ‘ordinary’ human environment and the
inclusion of said puppets is remarkably smooth, avoiding a lot of the pitfalls
that the similarly racially-tinged Bright made in its world-building by keeping
things vague enough to avoid the bigger plot holes, but detailed enough so that their coexistence makes sense. From the second-class citizen status of the puppets
to the seedier underbelly of their work to even a few nods to real-world racial
mindsets (the scene with Phil arguing with his older brother about having his
skin bleached and being fitted with a more human-looking nose cuts surprisingly close to the bone), the attempt at allegory holds true here.
Of course, selling the darker tone of this compared to most
other Henson productions is a bit of a mixed bag. The dialogue courtesy of Todd
Berger (and the doubtless improvisation occurring on-set) hits more blue
territory without it feeling like it’s derailing its own plot just to get to
the jokes, and with the inclusion of sugar as the puppet drug of choice, it
feels like some use is being made out of the premise. However, there is still a
sense that it isn’t going far enough, even considering how graphic it can get.
An early scene features what is described in-film as “an eight-handed
reach-around” involving some of the puppets, and while it is certainly an easy
grab for shock value, the film ends up milking it a little too much over time. It makes for the most graphic moment of the
story, whereas the majority of what we see isn’t all that grotesque.
After the sacred cow slaughter of Sausage Party, it’s been
made abundantly clear that filmmakers can show just about anything through the
veneer of non-human characters. We get some
of that dissonance regarding ‘puppets are people too’, which makes some of the
death scenes a bit unnerving, but… let’s just say that few things are worse to
see than someone who thinks they’re being a lot more “triggering” than they
actually are.
But that is honestly not the biggest issue here: The
attempts at shock comedy can be trite in places, but overall, it balances out
with the intermittently clever race allegories. No, the problem comes with how
this story is on its own, as a piece of black comedy film noir. Director Brian
Henson, son of Jim himself, has a pretty solid history to his name; this is the
same guy who gave us both The Muppet Christmas Carol and Muppet Treasure Island. If there’s one thing he can do well,
it’s remixing older stories with that Muppet brand of irreverence.
However, this story simply isn’t remixed nearly enough. It
has traces of Bright with a few sprinkles of Who Framed Roger Rabbit in its use
of non-human characters, a bit of Avenue Q in its attempts at subversion of the
once-innocuous puppets, maybe a more mainstream-friendly serving of Meet The
Feebles, but the big reference point? Pretty much any crime film you have ever seen, doubly so for film noir. This
sticks so closely to the clichés of the genre, from the disgraced detective to
the femme fatales to the obvious set-ups; this is so beat-for-beat that it’s a
little embarrassing, not to mention tedious when it comes to watching this
rather predictable crime caper unfold. The production components may make it
easier to sit through than it would be otherwise, but it still feels like a
fuzzy re-skin of an older story that could have been told far better than what we got here. I mean, when your film has some
genuinely clever moments to its name, the plot as a whole should fare better
than it does here.
All in all, it’s a fun if obviously derivative ride. The
acting is solid, both from the physical human actors and the puppeteers, the
design of the puppets and their environment gives the world-building here a
decent push in the right direction, and while the story is cobbled together
from all-too-familiar parts, there’s still quite a few moments where this
attempt at allegory for racial discrimination rings true. A little oddly, since
we get that odd disconnect of the white McCarthy and Barretta discussing racism
to the black police lieutenant, but true nonetheless. At any rate, when it
comes to being a sleazier kind of puppet story, it fares a hell of a lot better
than Nightmare On Elmo’s Street.
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