Reel Entropy

Image courtesy STX Entertainment.

2/10 I was optimistic for The Happytime Murders. Director/producer Brian Henson, Jim Henson’s son, is obviously more a Muppet guy than a Melissa McCarthy guy, and I was hoping this would be more of a Muppet movie than a Melissa McCarthy movie.

Again, my hopes were dashed.

The Happytime Murders tells the tale of Phil Phillips (Bill Barretta), a disgraced Los Angeles cop turned private investigator. Los Angeles suffers from an intense racial divide between puppets and humans – in the movie, it mirrors the divide between white cops and black Angelenos so closely that I can’t tell if it was meticulously planned or lazily drawn from the closest available headlines – and once, Phillips was the first ever puppet to become a police officer. On a case, he becomes entangled with a serial killer stalking the cast of The Happytime Gang, the a cultural touchstone from the ‘90s that helped mend relations between people and puppets. Phillips and his former partner, Detective Connie Edwards (McCarthy, who also produces) are thrust together to find the killer before the entire cast is exterminated.

Finding the killer likely means finding one of the castmates, all of whom stand to benefit from each other’s deaths – The Happytime Gang is about to go into syndication, at which point a massive royalty will be divided evenly among the surviving cast members. All of the former stars have fallen on hard times, and Phillips’ and Edwards’ investigation leads them on a tour of the darkest depths of Los Angeles puppet depravity.

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