When Disney released “The Muppets,” in 2011, it was the opening salvo in a bid to relaunch a neglected brand, and it worked. Not only did the film gross a hundred sixty-five million dollars globally; it was a joyful return to form after two decades of missteps and mismanagement. Buoyed by the enthusiasm of its star and co-writer, Jason Segel, the movie had something of the irreverent, anarchic wit of the old Jim Henson movies, plus a get-the-gang-back-together premise that tapped the nostalgia of grown Muppet fanatics. (Ahem.) Like “The Muppet Movie” (1979), it was an origin story with a heart of gold and a chorus of singing chickens.
The sequel, “Muppets Most Wanted,” which opened on Friday, takes a cue from the second Henson feature, “The Great Muppet Caper” (1981). Both revolve around a European jewel heist, and the new film even has a quickie synchronized-swimming sequence, surely an ode to the best musical number in Muppet history. Fresh off its comeback, the gang teams up with a sinister tour manager, the winkingly named Dominic Badguy (Ricky Gervais). Badguy is in cahoots with Constantine, the world’s most dangerous frog—a Kermit lookalike with a mole and a Russian accent. They plot a switcheroo: Constantine infiltrates the Muppets, and Kermit winds up in a Siberian gulag, where his jailer is none other than Tina Fey. (While we’re talking cameos, there are some doozies: Tony Bennett, Celine Dion, Usher, Christoph Waltz, and, if you can spot her among the felt crew, Lady Gaga.) At first, the Muppets are blind to Constantine’s obvious villainy (and Slavic accent), with the exception of Animal, who takes one sniff and growls: “Bad frog!” When Fozzie and Walter (a character introduced in “The Muppets”) finally catch on, the true Kermit is almost offended that it took so long.
But here’s where the film’s meta-humor hits uncomfortably close to home. It’s apt that any post-Henson Muppet movie would focus on an imposter. Muppet fans have long had to differentiate between counterfeit goods and the real thing. In the paltriest of the latter-day projects (“The Muppets’ Wizard of Oz,” anyone?), our erstwhile heroes seemed like the walking dead. Are these the Muppets we knew and loved, or a well-marketed menagerie of body snatchers? It’s not just that the main characters have literally changed hands—and voices. As Kermit and Piggy, Steve Whitmire and Eric Jacobson are worthy successors to Henson and Frank Oz, but they just don’t sound the same. The more important smell test is one of tone: that cocktail of cleverness, warmth, and mania that marked the Henson years. “The Muppets” (under the creative stewardship of James Bobin and Nicholas Stoller) had it; “Muppets Most Wanted,” less so.
Children, if they have any taste, will eat it up, but their chaperones will know that something is missing. It isn’t for lack of goofiness. This is probably the only time we’ll see Kermit and Liz Lemon rehearsing the opening number of “A Chorus Line” with a cast of Siberian convicts. (Isn’t that one Ray Liotta? Why, yes.) Bobin and Stoller cram the movie with gags, both highbrow (the Swedish Chef recreating “The Seventh Seal”) and sublimely stupid (Sam the Eagle and Ty Burrell, as rival investigators, comparing badge sizes). But most of these gags amount to vaudevillian wheel-spinning, and none match the absurdist highs of “The Great Muppet Caper.” For a refresher on how that movie welded lunacy with deadpan wit, witness John Cleese and Joan Sanderson dryly observing a “pig climbing up the outside of the house”: it’s as if Miss Piggy had crashed a Pinter play.
Speaking of whom, it was dismaying to see Miss Piggy, in the new film, so reliant on the validation of men (meaning male frogs). Our heroine spends much of the film begging Kermit to marry her and blithely planning their honeymoon, as if unconcerned with her other partner, the spotlight. When the two frogs appear side by side on her wedding day, she must use a woman’s (pig’s) intuition to distinguish between the boastful, acquisitive Constantine and the sweetly prevaricating Kermit. (Future Muppet historians will read this as a Putin vs. Obama allegory.) In the final sequence, she is little more than a hamsel in distress. Since when did Piggy become a passive Disney princess? She’s a world-famous diva with the chutzpah of Beyoncé and the martial-arts skills of Jackie Chan. Let’s hope that in the next movie—which, if it follows the example of “The Muppets Take Manhattan” (1984), will be a showbiz romp—she gets back to kicking frog and taking names. No one puts Piggy in a corner.
