What you want most in a Muppet movie is for the non-Muppets to seem happy. You have to ask this with a Muppet movie because guest stars are essentially the only variable. Kermit, Miss Piggy, Fozzie, Gonzo, Animal, and the rest — they’re pretty much the same. So you’re looking at, say, the Siberian gulag scenes in the new Muppets Most Wanted, and asking, Is Ray Liotta enjoying himself doing all those musical numbers? And he is.
There are a handful of excuses to laugh out loud in this movie — the eighth such live-action feature and the second of Nicholas Stoller and James Bobin’s resurrection. But the sight of Liotta, as a neck-tattooed inmate, twirling and wagging his knees behind Tina Fey (she’s the gulag’s warden), induces a high that lasts longer than the closing credits. To some extent, Liotta’s got it easy. He shares his scenes with Fey, Danny Trejo, Jemaine Clement, some extras in drab prison garb, and very few Muppets. Trejo is one of Robert Rodriguez’s coconspirators, so he knows how to handle family-movie folly. Clement made music and musical television with Bret McKenzie, who composes the songs for these movies, and Fey is Fey. You expect lunacy from these people. With Liotta, you just expect a lunatic. But the mood of comedy gets to him, and soon he’s dancing, and the sight is not unlike witnessing a Muppet leap through the air or ride a bicycle: simultaneously real and unreal.
The Muppets from three years ago had more of these moments — it was a smart and very funny reintroduction. It found a way to love Muppetness and mockingly consider how showbiz has changed in the years between the Muppets’ 1970s-1980s heyday and the 21st century. It also got Chris Cooper to square off against a Muppet in song. The magic feels more mundane this time. It puts The Muppet Show on a world tour and builds around it a caper-movie plot. A nefarious Kermit look-alike named Constantine (Matt Vogel) escapes the gulag and, in a mix-up, is replaced there by the actual Kermit (Steve Whitmire). Under Constantine’s rule, The Muppet Show goes to hell; he’s preoccupied with ransacking banks and museums in pursuit of treasure. Somehow, none of the others notice that Kermit now speaks in a cartoon Russian accent and that he’s really mean. Their incompetence goes on for too long, and that saps the movie of what I love about the Muppets: the actual old-timey showbiz of The Muppet Show.
With Kermit locked up, the tour is putting audiences to sleep, but has them cheering at the end of every performance. That’s because their new, toast-dry manager (Ricky Gervais) happens to be Constantine’s henchman and is prepaying for huge applause and rapturous reviews. Not even Kermit’s protégé, Walter (Peter Linz), can restore order. With the show in disarray, the best numbers fall to the guest stars. Fey, for instance, leads those inmates through an uptempo, doo-wop-dusted number called “In the Big House.” It sounds like something Linda Ronstadt or Melissa Manchester would have recorded in 1981. Fey caries a tune the way Jesus carried the cross, but the movie manages to turn the quality of her singing into a joke that she’s in on.
The Muppets themselves are overstocked and underused. They do get two good numbers to themselves, one in which Constantine seduces Miss Piggy (Eric Jacobson) and another staged during an interrogation sequence in which Ty Burrell and Sam Eagle shake down the Muppets for clues about vandalism and stolen art. McKenzie has an ingenious appreciation for pop hooks. I’ve never seen an episode of Flight of the Conchords — the HBO show he did with Clement and Bobin — more than once, but I remember most of the songs. He gives the ones here the same sheen of diet disco, light soul, and comic lugubriousness.
It was worrying, the news that the Conchords team would be reviving the Muppets. Would it be arch? Would it carry a hipster odor? It was easy not to miss the ways in which the originals’ songcraft and peerlessly witty production design obscured a kind of ardency. It was easy to see only cool. But The Muppets, which Stoller wrote with the actor Jason Segel, was a romance between its makers and Jim Henson’s creations, and the love infected the audience at both ends of the age spectrum. In this follow-up, when the Muppets take Madrid, they kick off that evening by performing the opening theme song in Spanish. It’s the tour’s fleeting moment of professionalism. But too much of the joy imparted by Muppets Most Wanted has too little to do with the Muppets themselves.