James Bobin’s second Muppet film is a brisk, daft caper with a run of good songs and a frog villain who earns every laugh. It is also crowded with cameos and short on the warmth that made the 2011 film land.
James Bobin’s second Muppet film begins the moment the first one ends. The cameras are still rolling on the last shot of The Muppets (2011), somebody asks what happens now, and the answer arrives as a song: a sequel, which everyone on screen concedes is seldom as good as the original. It is a good joke and an honest one. Muppets Most Wanted, written by Bobin and Nicholas Stoller, is faster and busier than the film before it, has a better villain, and is missing the thing that made the earlier film worth the tears. We enjoyed most of its 107 minutes and had forgotten half of them by the car park.
The villain is Constantine, the world’s most dangerous frog, who looks exactly like Kermit apart from a mole on one cheek and a voice from somewhere east of Minsk. Matt Vogel plays him with a flat, bored menace and a complete inability to say Kermit’s lines without bending them, and every scene he is in works. Ricky Gervais, as the tour manager Dominic Badguy (pronounced, he insists, the French way), plays the number two with the misery of a man who has read his own billing. The pair of them share the film’s best running gag about who is in charge, and we laughed out loud more than once, usually when Constantine attempted warmth and achieved something nearer threat.
Kermit, meanwhile, has been mistaken for Constantine and shipped to a Siberian gulag run by Nadya, a guard played by Tina Fey with an accent she enjoys more than the script quite deserves. The prison is where the film is most alive. Eve Stewart builds it as a snowbound wooden compound with a stage at one end, because of course it has a stage, and the inmates, several of them faces you will know, are rehearsing a revue. Fey and Steve Whitmire’s Kermit have a sweetness together that the main plot never finds. Kermit directing convicts in a chorus line is the closest the film comes to the frog we know.
Back on the tour, Interpol sends Jean Pierre Napoleon (Ty Burrell) to look into the robberies, and he is partnered with Sam Eagle of the CIA. The two spend the film comparing the size of their badges and arguing about lunch breaks. Burrell plays him as a man worn down by European working hours, and Eric Jacobson’s Sam has rarely been given so much to do. Bret McKenzie’s songs are the other reliable pleasure: a sung interrogation of the whole troupe, a gulag welcome number, and Constantine’s serenade to Miss Piggy, which has no business being as catchy as it is.
Don Burgess shoots it bright and clean, which suits the stage numbers and flattens the Berlin and Madrid streets into something closer to a brochure. Rahel Afiley dresses Gervais in sharp dark suits and Fey in a greatcoat, and the costumes are the only things in Siberia that look warm. James Thomas cuts between the tour and the gulag and keeps both moving, though the Madrid stretch runs on past its last joke. Christophe Beck’s score fills the gaps between songs with capable caper brass and is forgotten the moment the next song arrives.
What the film lacks is Kermit. Not the puppet, who is here, but the character at the centre, the frog whose worrying held the troupe together. For most of the running time the Muppets are being led by an impostor who says yes to everything, and the joke is that almost none of them notice. That is a good joke for twenty minutes. Around the hour mark we found we missed him, and the film did not seem to, and that was where it lost us a little. Walter (Peter Linz), who carried the last film, is given little to do, and the cameos, Tony Bennett and Hugh Bonneville among them, arrive so thickly that the Muppets start to look like guests at their own film.
Most critics have landed about where we have: a step down from the 2011 film, and the opening song said so first. It carries a U and runs 107 minutes, and the children we watched with did not notice the slack patches that we did. Watch it with them, expect Constantine’s accent to be repeated for a week, and keep the previous film for the night you want to feel something.
