The Happytime Murders is dead on arrival
As I was watching The Happytime Murders I couldn’t help but think of Who Framed Roger Rabbit. The 1988 classic was a testament to the marriage of good storytelling and passionate filmmaking. Every single shot was carefully and artfully crafted, not just because it of the love of the cast and crew, but because they were inventing the technology as they went.
When Roger Ebert described the film, he said, “In a way, what you feel when you see a movie like this is more than appreciation. It’s gratitude. You know how easy it is to make dumb, no-brainer action movies, and how incredibly hard it is to make a movie like this, where every minute of screen time can take days or weeks of work by the animators. You’re glad they went to the trouble.”
It’s the type of film you can watch again and again. The Happytime Murders is not.
In some ways, it’s the anti-Who Framed Roger Rabbit because it seems so joyless and boring. Both films contain a hard-boiled detective. Both films contain a marriage of real world grit and childhood innocence (although The Happytime Murders fails miserably at it).
But the difference is that one set of filmmakers genuinely cared about making a smart, witty comedy. The other one settled for crude and stupid.
As I said, the story is a detective one. Phil Phillips is a blue puppet kicked off the police force due to a shooting incident where he allegedly refused to shoot a fellow puppet. There’s a lot of references to puppets as second class citizens in this version of Los Angeles, which I guess is writer Todd Berger’s way of injecting some sort of political commentary into the script.
Regardless, Phil is approached by a femme fatale puppet who needs him to track down the sender of some threatening letters. It puts Phil directly into the line of fire as cast members of a popular ‘80s kids show start to get murdered. Forced to reunite with his former partner (Melissa McCarthy) for some reason, Phil begins his investigation.
It’s hard to say exactly where The Happytime Murders went wrong. It was directed by Brian Henson, son of the legendary Jim Henson, and a competent director in his own right. He even directed A Muppet Christmas Carol, which might even be my favorite version of that story. But this film looks and feels off from the first frame.
Where A Muppet Christmas Carol appeared seamless and full of life, a strong combination of both puppetry and live action that created a lived in world, the puppets in The Happytime Murders feel tacked on.
I never got the impression that the actors were talking to living creatures, or were even used to talking to puppets on a regular basis. It just seemed gimmicky and weird. Most of the jokes are either overly crude to the point of boring or ham-fisted improv that has become a Melissa McCarthy staple.
There’s simply not much to laugh at in the script. Maybe this is because we have no reason to care about the characters. Maybe this is because the story is stale and boring. Maybe this is because the performances seem phoned in. Whatever the reason, it doesn’t work.
According to sources, The Happytime Murders cost between around $47 million to make. Who Framed Roger Rabbit cost around $50 million. Obviously, there is a difference between 1988 dollars and 2018 dollars, but it’s hard to understand why one film with a similar premise was so enchanting and the other is such garbage.
I would rather watch Brian Henson set $47 million on fire than watch The Happytime Murders again. And that’s exactly what you’d being doing if you bought a ticket. Burning away your hard earned money for no reason.
I wonder who thought this film was a good idea. I wonder who the audience for the film was supposed to be. I wonder how Brian Henson convinced talented actors like Maya Rudolf and Elizabeth Banks to be in the movie. I wonder about the mental state of the man behind me who laughed at every stupid thing that happened on screen.
There are so many questions about this film. None of them are worth answering.