The Happytime Murders | Film Review

If you are a listener to our companion podcast, you know that in Episode 324 we puppet up some movies. The thesis of the episode was; throw puppets into any movie and vastly improve it. Overall the outcome was highly imaginative, fun, hysterical, and we unanimously agreed puppets done right can improve anything. So, if that’s the case, then The Happytime Murders, a movie designed around puppets being naughty created by the masters of puppets ( I didn’t see what I was doing there until I was done) at Henson Alternative must be fantastic right? Well…

Happytime was a 1980s children’s television show, and it was the first to show humans and puppets working together in equality. You see, in this world puppets are a race of people made up of felt and stuffing that live and breathe… and other stuff. Wink, wink, nudge, nudge, say no more. Today the Happytime show is about to make a big syndication deal and the cast will be sharing a $10m payout. Naturally, someone starts to turn the cast into blasted bits of felt, cotton, and stuffing.

Enter Phil Philips (voiced by Bill Barretta), a private dick, and the first and last puppet cop. His brother was one of the cast on the Happytime show. Through a turn-of-events, Phil ends up sucked into the case and is forced to work with his ex-partner and human, Detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy). From here just throw in a femme fatale, a bumbling heel to work against and you have the makings of a by-the-numbers, noir detective story. It is fine, like really, just fine. The story isn’t very complicated, not exactly layered, easy to follow, and has a decent twist to it.

In terms of the cast; alright, you have Melissa McCarthy doing that McCarthy thang. She is bombastic, strings insults together like other actors breathe, performs fun and fanciful feats of physical comedy, and you’ve seen it before. Maya Rudolph does a sweet and cutesy performance, and Joel McHale has a fun bit as being the “heel” of the story. Elizabeth Banks shows up for a few scenes and she was fine too, maybe. The humans in this piece showed up to work and not take matters too seriously, which was obvious in the result.

Now to the other side of the cast, the puppets. If everything else in this story was “just fine”, this is clearly where it is going to shine right? Well yea, they turned what would have been a bland and washed-up story into something to at least liven up to. It is hard to say you didn’t like something if it puts a genuine smile on your face. Phil Philips may not be Stacy Keach, but he doesn’t need to be. Some of the ridiculous and dirty things we saw the puppets do in this movie might have been unnecessarily gross and childish, but damn everyone in that theater laughed. Isn’t that the point of it all? I’m still not sure what that dalmatian was doing to the firefighter, and now I’m just concerned. Regardless, there is much to grin about as the film rolls on.

So is it easy to make puppets look like living breathing members of society? Well, the director Brian Henson’s movie made it look easy, but then in the behind-the-scenes shots after the credits, NOPE! Boy, did it look like one helluva good time! Something I railed against as a viewer was just how plain everything looked, especially in contrast to three-foot magic people who get addicted to sucrose running around. I suppose some of this must be made in a certain way to fit the puppeteer and the operators in the room a specific way, however it was difficult to shake that much of the proceedings felt very made-for-TV.

So, here we are, the closing thoughts of my little excursion into the puppet-verse. Where do I, a man who proudly admits to crying at nearly every Muppet Movie land? Whelp, Squarely in the middle. The Happytime Murders take a genre of storytelling and makes it their own. They execute this marvelous little experiment so that their cookie cutter story and made-for-television set design are elevated to just above mediocrity, simply because they have puppets! It will not win awards, and most people won’t like it, but I smiled the whole way through and the audience around me laughed at all the jokes. Which is a feat considering the trailers, if you watched them all, showed all of the best parts.

Now, let’s discuss that dalmation…