The Happytime Murders (2018)

The Happytime Murders isn't as bad as everyone is making it out to be. It doesn't mange to live up to the potential but it is often genuinely funny, and not just in a provocative way. The story just doesn't offer enough to sustain the entire film. It is an example of a good idea which didn't quite get pulled off, but manages to be entertaining enough.

This is a difficult thing to pull off. As with anything absurdist, the idea of making an adult themed comedy which touches on thinly veiled (if veiled at all) social commentary in a Sesame Street style is the kind of thing audiences will either embrace or dismiss entirely without even trying to understand. So the burden was on the film makers to make it remarkable, to overcome our discomfort with puppets doing anything other than family friendly entertainment. It's been done. Avenue Q shows us how to do this right. I still think an Avenue Q movie would be wonderful. And maybe even prepare audiences for how to handle something like this.

But the problem with The Happytime Murders is the story remains fairly flat and predictable so the movie's oddities stand out more. If the story had been somehow more revelatory, offered something substantial, I think this could have worked. The film makers create this allegory for racism but then don't explore that any further than making jokes about it. Everything about The Happytime Murders feels non-committal. Like they only wanted to push certain kinds of buttons and not others. Let's tell disgusting sex jokes but not deconstruct systems of oppression. There is a missed opportunity here. They could have taken a page out of Who Framed Roger Rabbit to see how this sort of this is done.

The one thing they do commit to fully is the comedy. They go hard R comedy here and that is the main saving grace of the film. It's funny. I wasn't impressed with Sausage Party (again, story lacked substance) but here I laughed through most of it. The cast here is damn funny. From McCarthy to Rudolph to Banks, I could watch them do almost anything. And the main puppet voiced and performed by the creator of Pepe the Prawn, holds his own with those funny ladies. If The Happytime Murders did anything for me it made me laugh.

And that's why I can't totally condemn it. Yeah I wish it was smarter and more engaging. But I laughed a lot.

The Happytime Murders
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Bill Barretta, May Rudolph, Elizabeth Banks, John McHale, Leslie David Baker
Director: Brian Hensen
Writer: Todd Berger