Brought to you by the letter F

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 24/08/2018 (2992 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

One of the tag lines for raunchy puppet movie The Happytime Murders is “No Sesame. All street.”

If only this puerile, tedious film had even a whiff of the whimsy and smarts of Sesame Street.

In its rush to set itself apart from cute kids fare, the film — directed by Brian Henson, son of Muppet master Jim Henson — piles on the sex and drugs, but forgets the script and characters.

The premise is promising (if a bit familiar): in an alternate Los Angeles, puppets live alongside humans, but are second-class citizens, scorned and disdained (shades of Who Killed Roger Rabbit).

Phil Philips (Bill Barretta) is a down-at-heel private dick (his fuzzy blue skin is pilled and dirty) who was kicked off the police force for failing to shoot a puppet criminal. Now he handles petty cases out of a run-down office, helped by his human secretary Bubbles (the delightful Maya Rudolph, whose body language is funnier than anything the filmmakers can do with Silly String).

When the stars of the Happytime Gang — a popular TV show that featured a human star, Jenny (Elizabeth Banks), and a cast of puppets, including Phil’s brother — start being murdered one by one, Phil has to join up with his ex-partner, the human detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy), to solve the mystery.

Complicating matters is the fact that Connie is the one who got him fired, in a scandal that led to a statute preventing puppets from working with humans on the police force.

What follows is a jumbled mess of missed opportunities, flat attempts at humour and salacious behaviour that mistakes excess for edginess — certain things work best served up with a wink, not a box of Kleenex.

The filmmakers must know they’re far from the first to dabble in puppet sex — see Avenue Q, Meet the Feebles, Hand to God, Team America — but rather than make it original or funnier, they just make it grosser.

There might be some humour inherent in an adorable rabbit called Bumblypants indulging in his porn addiction, but it’s handled with such a leaden touch, it feels icky, not ironic.

The film passes up the chance to use the puppets’ status to make sly social commentary. It fails to be a compelling mystery. It garners maybe three out-loud laughs — and then it milks those (in one case literally) until the humour has been wrung out (a good joke doesn’t need to be repeated three times, a bad joke even less so).

It sounds faintly ridiculous to lament the lack of internal logic in a movie like this, but the lack of rules is confusing. You can’t beat puppets up — “You know I have no bones,” Phil says to a thug — but they have organs? If puppets are all good inside, as Bubbles says, why are there puppet criminals?

The usually reliable McCarthy is given little to work with — the script by Todd Berger seems to think the height of wit is “Eff you,” “No, eff you” — though she does rise to the occasion in a scene when she defends the honour of some puppet ladies by fighting a misogynist bulldog.

For no good reason, her character is constantly mistaken for a man, but then again, the motto of this movie could be For No Good Reason.

And the part that should be the most fun, the puppets, is fumbled too. This motley crew is mostly charmless and forgettably designed — save for the deliciously seedy buzzard who runs a porn shop, with his peeling scalp and red eyelids — but in any case, we’re barely given a chance to get to know them before they’re blown into scraps of stuffing.

As those cranky old Muppet men in the balcony, Statler and Waldorf, once said, “I’ve seen detergents that left a better film.”

jill.wilson@freepress.mb.ca Twitter: @dedaumier