Hold your laughs folks…
Muppet-style puppets and dirty jokes. How bad could it be? The Happytime Murders stumbled into theaters and was supposed to be a Sesame Street for adults. It certainly was and it doesn’t mean it was great. The movie goes above and beyond to be as outrageous as it can be, not that its a bad thing, but the content has to hit home.
When it comes to these types of films, one thing is certain. They either end up being only really good, or really, really bad. There is no in between. For The Happytime Murders, it was the latter. This movie is riddled with a bunch of bad setups to bad jokes that just don’t resonate throughout. There have been puppet movies with even filthier content that were fresh with plenty of laughs, such as 2004’s Team America: World Police, but this just isn’t one of them.
Running at just over an hour and a half, the film is the definition of a quick-flick, but even the movie’s short length does nothing to help its cause. The thing just seems to drag relentlessly at times. It seemed that for every one good joke, the four or five that followed simply missed the mark, and that’s obviously a bad formula in a comedy. The sub-par plot also doesn’t do it any favors, even if that was the intention.
We’re seeing more, and more adult comedies in different forms of animation and puppeteering. Admittingly that’s refreshing, and it’s understandable that this movie was going to be dirty for the sake of being dirty. That is okay; however, what’s also important is substance, and this one has very little of it. No one was expecting an Oscar performance. That’s not what this was supposed to be but the production and writing team could have tried a little harder.
Given the film’s lackluster story and shoddy joke-telling, it does have one or two moments that shine to its credit. The movie did manage to generate a couple of genuine laughs and even a slightly surprising twist to an otherwise predictable plot (even though it didn’t save the film). However, the pros simply don’t do enough to outweigh the cons this time. The fact that the movie had some few moments tells us that this could have worked, but it was just poorly executed. With all that being said, avoid this one if you can.
