dMYD DVD
Starring Dirty Hippies
M
Well son, it’s not quite a mop, and it’s not quite a puppet. It’s not quite Disney, loudly stomping all over mankind’s best stories for nearly a century and pumping them full of big eyes and great songs and timeless animation, but it’s not quite the Looney Tunes either, dated and dirty and devoid of a heart. The Muppets always worked best when they were gently kicking celebrities in the groin, making them talk to chickens orkarate-chop things with big noses whilst singing songs from Doctor Doolittle; they sucked the fun out whenever they turned into hippy propaganda told through a screen of felt and ping-pong balls. The movie’s full of both. Consequently their shtick has aged in more ways than one; pretty much everyone involved in The Muppet Movie is dead, but it doesn’t matter because you probably haven’t heard of them anyway. Sarcasm can take a dive; a cameo’s the lowest form of laugh because of its hot-yoghurt like shelf life, and despite some occasional visual yuk-yuks, famous people popping up for a couple of seconds are The Muppets’ bread and butter. A few escape through being genuinely funny; Steve Martin turns up wearing shorts and sneering into a pig’s face, whilst Orson Welles looks grumpy and tired, surrounded by Oscars he never won and playing the type of movie mogul who he must have hated with a planet-eating rage. The plot’s yet another barren seventies road trip, punctuated with barely-scripted set pieces and puppets being chucked at extras, while the whole thing painfully side-lines The Swedish Chef and Beaker, THE TWO BEST MUPPETS EVER.
And the hippy crap? Sing one of the songs. Go on, do it. You can’t; they’re crap and they’re everywhere, with meandering new-age whimsy in place of lyrics and comedy voices so grating that your ears’ll flake off like expensive parmesan. It’s a film that never really plays to the strengths of its characters, and even when it does the references are so dated that it’s not worth watching in this brave new millennium. If they’d try it again, with better jokes, today’s celebrities, and half of Flight of the Conchords doing the songs, the beardy one, if it was being released on February the tenth and was called The Muppets and looked pretty freaking great… well then we might have a film.
…But it does have Big Bird. And Big Bird is THE MAN. Bird thing. Bird man thing. He’s great.
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