While The Happytime Murders has an interesting premise, it misses out on the opportunity to make a clever satire and instead opts for low-brow humor.
Puppet and former detective Phil Philips (Bill Barretta) now works as a private detective. A case reunites Phil with his former human LAPD partner Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy). Philips and Edwards discover that a string of deaths is connected to a payout from a popular puppet TV show.
There is plenty of potential within The Happytime Murders; it has a fantastic cast, it has a solid premise, and puppets are typically entertaining. However, the film does not capitalize on its many strengths and instead tries to make the film as raunchy as possible.
As proven by the Tony-winning musical Avenue Q, the combination of puppets and R-rated humor can be incredibly entertaining. In fact, this experiment was so successful that Avenue Q beat Wicked for the Tony Award for Best Musical in 2004. Unfortunately, The Happytime Murders did not learn from the success of Avenue Q.
Avenue Q is partially as funny as it is because it does not draw attention to the fact that half of the cast are puppets. In fact, the word “puppet” is only said once in the musical. The puppet humor derives from the audience seeing puppets in situations and saying lines that seem absurd for puppets. The show does not have to blatantly repeat that these are puppets because the audience can plainly see that fact.
It feels like every other word in The Happytime Murders is “puppet.” Instead of just allowing the puppets to exist in this universe, the film inserts a messy social commentary about how puppets do not have the same equality as people, which ultimately has no real bearing on the plot. Because The Happytime Murders is so insistent on reminding the audience that there are puppets in the film, it tries to find as many inappropriate situations in which to place the puppets and yells, hey this is funny because they are puppets.
The Happytime Murders’s humor would be so much more effective if it treated the puppets like people instead of constantly signaling the obvious. For example, it would be much funnier to see puppets snorting cocaine than to see them snorting sugar. The magic of this world is lost because the film inserts rules and politics for the puppets instead of just letting them coexist with humans. Because The Happytime Murders wastes so much time with puppet logic it detracts from the story and the characters.
There is actually a rather interesting mystery plot within The Happytime Murders. However, the film ignores that its protagonists are detectives and instead of allowing them to try to solve the murders they just follow the crime scenes. Further, because so much time is devoted to attempting to make this a raunchy comedy, it is easy to forget that there was actually a mystery buried somewhere within the film.
The beginning of The Happytime Murders suggests that the movie could be a film noir. The movie begins with a typical hard-boiled private detective giving a voice-over as he drives through Los Angeles. This set-up proves to be incredibly disappointing in the end because it shows that the movie could have been a clever film noir satire. Just the idea of a puppet detective is funnier than the whole of The Happytime Murders. Ultimately, any prospect of this movie being a film noir is sidelined by every uncreative and tedious graphic joke.
There are a handful of moments throughout The Happytime Murders proving that the film had an immense amount of potential that is completely squandered. Further, the movie completely wastes its human actors. The Happytime Murders tried too hard and failed at being a raunchy comedy and is most successful the few times when it is subtly witty.
Grade: D+