When perpetually-in-development-hell movies finally get made, it should be a cause for celebration. It should be the moment when the plucky underdog beats the system and makes the impossible possible. Unfortunately, barring a few exceptions, the results are almost always disappointing. This is the case for The Happytime Murders, which has been in development at the Henson Company ever since the script landed on the Blacklist in 2008. Sadly, I have to report that the film is one of the worst movies of the year.
 
Phil Philips (voiced and performed by Bill Barretta) is a puppet and disgraced former police detective, who is now a private investigator in downtown Los Angeles. This is a world in which puppets try to live side by side with humans. However, it’s not an easy co-existence, as the humans are extremely racist towards the puppets and call them derogatory terms like “socks.” When the cast of the sitcom The Happytime Gang (one of whom being Phil’s brother) is murdered one by one, Phil has to join forces with his former partner, detective Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy), to solve the case. And for ninety interminable minutes we watch these detectives plod through a boring noir procedural while making lazy sex jokes and doing drugs. No, really, the majority of the jokes in the film are “puppets are having sex, killing each other and doing drugs!” Unfortunately, this territory has been thoroughly explored in other, better properties – movies like Peter Jackson’s Meet the Feebles, television shows like Greg the Bunny, the Tony Award winning musical Avenue Q and Trey Parker and Matt Stone’s Team America: World Police. Not to mention that the movie on the whole feels like a reheated Who Framed Roger Rabbit? – but without that film’s wit or creativity.
 
As I walked out of my screening of The Happytime Murders I had to wonder, just why were there even puppets in this movie? The racism metaphor isn’t particularly explored in any depth. And after you see one puppet’s head explode in a cloud of stuffing…there’s no real need to see another one. Want to see a female puppet's pubic hair? Well, there’s a joke inspired by Sharon Stone’s infamous leg uncrossing moment from Basic Instinct (but you know, with a puppet…that’s the joke). A puppet ejaculating silly string for three minutes is sort of funny, but that’s the only good joke in the film’s entire runtime.
 
Maybe the intention of the film is to play with noir tropes, but with puppets? However, in order for that to work you need to truly commit to the noir aesthetics. The film would need to be shot like The Last Boy Scout – lots of smoke, blue filters and a thick layer of sleaze over everything. Instead the film is directed in such a pedestrian manner that the noir parody aspect just doesn’t work. I truly feel terrible ragging on a movie like this. This has been director Brian Henson’s passion project for the last ten years, but his style of filmmaking is just wrong for a project like this. He has lots of experience working with puppets, but in order for this film to work it needed a director with a stylistic edge. On the other hand, the script by Todd Berger, from a story by Berger and Dee Austin Robertson, does nobody any favors. The detective story isn’t engaging and the characters are walking clichés searching for good jokes.  
 
The cast here is fine. McCarthy brings her usual manic energy to the role, but I found her “foul mouthed cop” performance a bit grating and over the top. Everyone else in the human cast does what they can, but nobody is really given much chance to make an impression.
 
The one saving grace the film has is that the puppetry is really well done. The use of CGI and green screen to put the puppets in the real world is fantastic – I just wish all that effort had been used for a better movie.
 
The end credits show us making-of footage, and it seems like everyone involved had a great time making The Happytime Murders – I just wish that feeling transferred to the audience.
 
One star out of four.