Summary
2 tech score
“The Happytime Murders” (STX Entertainment)
Hollywood continues to amaze! Who would have thought that Jim Henson’s puppet-like creatures would be in a hard R rated movie titled “The Happytime Murders”, and that they would be placed there by Henson’s son Brian. Adding insult to injury, Melissa McCarthy heads the cast. The movie is as lewd, crude, rude as it could be and falls flat on its face trying to sell its insulting brand of comedy.
The sad thing is there are children who will be taken to see this movie by unaware parents who are too blind to see the R rating or too ignorant to care. Being there they will see the cute lovable puppets partake in violence , commit a variety of sex acts and use every four letter word on the planet. McCarthy chimes in with some violence and profanity herself.
If the film had been performed by all human actors it could have been an okay movie about a detective whose brother and the rest of the cast of a popular TV show are being killed off one after the other. Or they could have cleaned up the script and had an all puppet movie aimed at the kids, and that would have been even better. But no they had to make it a hybrid that doesn’t please anybody.
It is such a shame to see talented actresses such as Elizabeth Banks and Maya Rudolph try to bring a spark of life to their woodenly written characters. At some point they give up and just sink into the slime. It doesn’t matter about Joel McHale, who plays an FBI Agent. He isn’t that good an act0or anyway.
Still the one who suffers the most is McCarthy. She has a good career going and this insipid film can only hurt the popularity she has garnered. The film uses jokes about her being a man, being overweight, and being hooked on drugs. Yeah, that is a charming character for her to portray. I still think she is a talented actress, but I now seriously question her ability to select good roles. Everything about this script should have hollered “Run, scream, hide!”
The film is rated R for profanity, violence and sexual situations.
Poor Jim Henson. I doubt he labored all his life to create adorable creatures who would be drug through the mud of this movie. Regardless of how unpopular and little seen this movie is, the impact of crude mouthed puppets is going to stay around for a long time to come.
I scored “The Happytime Murders” a sad 2 out of 10.
Jackie K Cooper
www.jackiekcooper.com
