We saw The Muppets last week. I think it’s the first Muppet film I’ve seen in a theater since the original Muppet Movie, and I am not even 100 percent sure that I saw that one at the movies. If you want to know what I think about the movie, keep reading. If you want to know how I feel about it, skip to the last paragraph.
The Muppets is definitely a throwback to the original film – the characters are trying to put on a show while also being aware that they’re in a movie about them trying to put on a show. The breaking-the-fourth-wall and entertainment inside humor are the source of many of my favorite jokes in the film. The story and the character development serve mainly as pegs for the humor – they’re all drawn very broadly and don’t have a lot of room to develop. Conflicts are introduced and quickly resolved before the audience has a chance to really get invested in them.
The one character element that I had a problem with is that Kermit seemed a bit passive in the film. He needs to be prodded into doing just about everything, and there’s an untold story about how Kermit let the gang drift apart in the first place. He rallies a bit toward the end, but as someone who’s always liked Kermit, I felt a little let down.
The interesting theme of the movie is that the Muppets have been out of action for so long that they’re out of fashion and ignored. So they have to prove to themselves and the world that there’s still a place for their kind of entertainment. The movie plays up the idea that the Muppets are stuck in the 80s, even introducing a character called 80s Robot. It was a little weird to me to see this element. The Disney Muppets had a TV show and several theatrical movies in the 90s. They made a couple of TV movies and several viral online videos in the 2000s. I felt like the movie ignored all of that and pretended that the Muppets went dormant after The Muppet Show ended and The Muppets Take Manhattan left theaters. By all means, the movie is free to pick and choose its continuity – it’s not like there’s ever been a single coherent canon for the characters – but the meta theme didn’t totally click with me.
All of that said, toward the end of the movie, Kermit and the other Muppets perform “The Rainbow Connection,” and Alex started to sing along. In that moment, The Muppets became one of the most joyous experiences I’ve ever had in a movie theater, and left no doubt that there’s still a place for these characters.