Music and Medicine

The Muppets

I’m sure by now you’ve already seen The Muppets, read about it to death, or simply don’t care. But you came here to read my hard-hitting critical review, and that’s exactly what you’re going to get. We’ll, sort of.

To start with, Jason Segel while a good choice as a writer, falls just short of the right performance. He’s a little too enthusiastic and it winds up being a little fake. As I’ll talk about in a little more detail, I wanted less humans, more Muppets. The original songs were what you could expect, although they seemed too front-loaded and contained to the human characters. 

In some conversations I had about the movie with others, someone brought up the point that the movie is less of a Muppet movie, and more of a movie remembering the Muppets. The difference being their previous movies were “Hey look, it’s the Muppets in a crazy and comical situation” and this movie was “Hey, you like the Muppets? Let’s laugh about remembering the Muppets.” To some extent I agree with this point. A lot of the movie was this weird meta-Muppet (human)  plot. In my opinion those were the weakest parts of the movie. The one exception was the whole sequence with Jack Black. His appearance both as Animal’s sponsor and as the guest host was perfect, and the funniest I’ve seen Jack Black in years.

The parts that focused on the Muppets themselves were fantastic. Those characters are timeless, and that’s what this movie was trying to prove. The whole point of the meta-Muppets was to open the characters to a new audience. And for that I think it worked. I took my “little” for Big Brothers, Big Sisters, and we had a great time. Granted some of the jokes were above his head, he really enjoyed the experience and a lot of the music. We spent the car ride home taking turns singing different parts of Mah Na Mah Na.

Overall, the movie was consistently good. I felt it didn’t really have a down section, but I didn’t feel extra ecstatic. I was just happy the entire way through, which is exactly what I wanted. Anything coming out from the legacy of Jim Henson is a higher level of television/movies. With that, I’ll leave you with a somewhat related clip from Sesame Street. Where Cookie Monster teaches Kermit a very important lesson about friendship.

Movie #4