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Starring The Muppets
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Underdogs and underpigs and underbears and underfrogs, The Muppets were always the runty archipelago to the continent-consuming might of DISNEYCORP, with budgets that only paid for bits of rope and weed and voice-acting that was always slightly too uniform across their menagerie of dead-eyed felt. But at their best… look up some Muppet Show stuff on YouTube and gurn at how different it is to ITV now, how lovely and ramshackle and stuffed with Steve Martin it all was back then. Not the best: as much as he may have tried to escape it there’s no doubt that Jim Henson’s real genius was Sesame Street, a beautiful, unending oasis of wonder and education that’ll outlive us all, but he also realised that his Muppets looked inherently stupid, and that any human muppet stood next to them would look stupider still, forced to choke a chicken or sing a song with a bean-bag full of pipe cleaners. The Muppet Showrevolved around two poles: inspired, pot-wrecked surrealism and chuckling away at real-life, a gentle type of satire infinitely more difficult to pull off than being Frankie Boyle. They lost these two spines for a while in some admittedly charming classic book adaptations… but now they’re back. And they’re old. It’s good.
The central conceit of The Muppets is near-genius. A group that relied upon laughing at the ridiculousness of fame has now been chewed up and chucked into the bins at the back of Disneyworld, forgotten for decades in a painfully honest mirror of our real life fickleness. No idea lasts forever, especially something as one note as Fozzie and co, but nostalgia and simplicity are wunderbar wares that’ll never go out of style, and as such it’s completely fitting that the flap-mouthed crew be given one last shot at putting on a show, their real-life hard times putting you on side from the start. They’re decrepit though, and limpy, so it’s up to some current fizz-bang talent to give them a leg up and draw in all the dumbos and hipsters and people who like The Big Bang Theory. All credit to Jason Segel – not so good at the acting, but a dab hand with street-dancing, dressing like a Vice City character and, crucially, writing a clever, sweet and few-lafs-a-minute script that treads a dizzy tightrope of mental, modern comedy and sentimental bubble bath run by pigs in spacesuits. Amy Adams also pulls a doozy as a romantic foil who could have come off as ball-chain, but thanks to an impeccable singing voice and wink in her eye she jazz-hands through the best musical number of the whole piece. And there’s the key; the whole thing’s directed by James Bobin of the equally charming and squewif Flight of the Conchords, whilst the role of ‘musical supervisor’ falls to Brett ‘Brit’ McKenzie, a modern-pop-joke-monster extraordinaire and creator of this. The Conchords stamp is dotted all over the movie, but most pronounced in three songs; Adams and Miss Piggy having an amazing ‘Me Party’, the world’s only credible old-white-man rap, and the bizarre, rain-drenched ‘Man or Muppet, a future YouTube-staple that turns a terrifying car-crash of bendy-arms, soft-rock and over emoting into four of the best minutes of any movie released last year.
At its velvety core though it’s all about the old school; after a great opening, relying heavily on the new humour of the new writers, the Muppets themselves arrive, dated and darling, and your heart’ll melt all over the carpet handing the movie over to them, to their endearing crapness and fart shoes, their love of old-school vaudeville and ending number daring in its message of entertainment for the masses. The sequel’s going to be a lot worse; this is the kind of nostalgia that can only be peddled out every thirty years, with returns flushing down a big toilet of indifference each time. But fuck it – they’re here now, for one night only, they’re funny and stupid and furry and the Swedish Chef makes sense now when he’s KICKING JACK BLACK IN THE FACE.
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