Muppets Most Wanted (2014)

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1. 

   owliesomething

   Muppets Most Wanted keeps the self-awareness and charm that makes the franchise so great. Let's repeat that - it keeps it. It almost feels like coming home and revisiting old friends with welcome arms.
   
   To make matters better, the film has a sense of humour that caters both to adults and children. The Muppets at their best bring out the child in the adult and this movie does so by not talking down to its audience but giving them a variety of humour. While there are some misses, I cannot recall any poop jokes and nothing as bad as the previous film's Fart Shoes gag.
   
   Perhaps the strength is the script, or in the editing, as the fourth-wall breaking jokes are all delivered with confidence and expertise. While maybe not as good as the previous film, it's still clear from the work put into the script that the writers are huge fans of the franchise.
   
   The plot is a tad formulaic, but the jokes are good enough to overcome them. It's strange that I didn't notice any product placement in the movie, and cannot rack my brains to discover if there was any (there's a reference to Netflix in the movie, but to consider it product placement is as laughable as the movie itself, which is to say very laughable. Very laughable indeed.)
   
   Basically, Muppets Most Wanted has a lot of good qualities (despite a very unimaginative title, changed from The Muppets... Again last June. This is particularly bad when you listen to lines in the first and last numbers, which make specific mention of the original title).
   
   What heart the film does have is earned. What humour the film has, works. What music isn't recycled from older films is generally a parody of a specific musical genre but apart from the opening number, tend to be largely forgettable (like many of the songs from Flight of the Conchords Season 2).
   
   If you're a Muppet fan and would like to remain one: Watch it! After all, you've already sat through the space one, The Wizard of Oz, the Merry Muppet Christmas one, that thing with Lady Gaga last year and quite a few other terrible things that The Muppets have put their name to. Anyone who can think that this particular movie would stop making you a Muppet fan, instead of those trainwrecks, is seriously deluded.
   
   Who could be that deluded, you ask? No idea :)
   
   Rating: Meaningless numbers out of meaningless numbers 10 years 1 month ago
2. 

   stefenemie

   Reading about someone being offended by product placement made me laugh. You do realize that The Muppets have been used for advertising since 1957, right?
   
   As for the film, I was pleasantly surprsied. I wasn't expecting it to be as good as The Muppets, which I thought fell slightly short of the original Muppet Movie. In a way, I actually liked this one better because it really featured The Muppets as the stars. The other film felt like a Jason Segel vehicle in which he reintroduced The Muppets.
   
   We get to see a lot more of the actual characters that most of us know and love in this one. Some of the lesser characters also get face time, and I love Rizzo's reference to how much of the last film was devoted to Walter. We get plenty of Walter in this one, but luckily it isn't overkill.
   
   Overall, a solid film even if a few jokes fall flat and there might be one too many musical numbers.
   
   "Goodnight, Danny Trejo" 10 years 1 month ago
3. 

   Siskoid

   Muppets Most Wanted starts exactly where the previous, much celebrated Muppets film ends, but yeah... no. The best Muppet movies (The Muppets, Muppets' Christmas Carol) have a lot of heart. The lesser efforts are merely silly romps. This is the latter. The Muppets are essentially caught in a caper-type tale (though there's a Cold War era mixed metaphor) when they get infiltrated by baddies (an evil frog and the particularly simpering Ricky Gervais' cat burglar). Lots of celebrities, both in roles and cameos, but the human acting is broader than it needs to be. There are a couple of good songs, but too many of them are done with mock Russian accents, and then there's the massive opener that tells us the name of the movie is The Muppets Again, which turns out it isn't (that's damn shoddy). At times, I don't know who they're making the movie for. The story logic is too cartoony for adults (and the lesson at the end dumb and cheesy), while jokey references to President Kennedy obviously don't play to the kids, nor do the ghoulish inferences of the Russian gulag. And then there's the whole shtick that's meant to attack Europe as a worker's paradise; I know Disney doesn't believe in employee rights, but that's some weird and irritating commentary right there. Sure, there are some good visual gags here and there, and we do care for the Muppets themselves, but otherwise, this is a far, far cry from the Muppets relaunch's success. 6 years 3 months ago

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