Thursday, August 23, 2018

Film Review - The Happytime Murders (2018)

The Happytime Murders is directed by Brian Henson son of Muppets creator Jim Henson and stars Melissa McCarthy as a police detective who once had a Puppet partner who now works as a private eye as an incident saw him disgraced from the service but when the cast of a TV show called The Happytime Gang keep winding up dead the two will have to work together to solve the case.

The Happytime Murders is a complete mess that really doesn’t work on almost any front and first off I start with the tone it is all over the place and on the one hand it goes for that Who Framed Roger Rabbit style of puppets and humans co existing much like how toons and humans co exist in the world of that film then on the other hand there’s lot of sex jokes, sexual scenes and swearing now granted this is an MA15 movie and it has some very inventive gun deaths but they just don’t work.

And that leads me to the second problem the comedy it’s dead D-E-A-D Dead none of the jokes work and none of them come from a consistent tone the sexual jokes just come out of nowhere and instead of generating laughs they just land with a complete thud and in the small audience I saw the movie in there was only one laugh, 1 in the whole time I was watching the movie and for a comedy that is dangerous.

And lastly the central mystery doesn’t work either as it becomes blindingly obvious from the get go who the killer is and as a result you get bored with the mystery and Ms McCarthy does some good physical comedy but her verbal gags just pretty much end up being her shouting a lot of her lines and after a while I just got sick of it.

So yeah the Happytime Murders was awful, nothing in it works and it fails to be fun, track down Who Framed Roger Rabbit? Instead as that is a far superior film, 1 out of 5.

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