This movie fucking sucks. I might as well just put that on the table at the top here. I know, right? A movie that took 10 years to get out of development hell and is about a puppet police detective is bad? Stop the presses.
Director: Brian Henson
Starring: Melissa McCarthy, Bill Barretta
Co-written with Tony.
SPOILERS ahead!!!
It's just so, so bad. It's like a distillation of a bunch of horrible jokes you'd hear at a bad comedy open mic vomited onto the screen with a bunch of puppets saying them. It's the kind of humor you'd hear from a 14 year old just trying to be edgy by making a bunch of raunchy jokes with no context or talent to do so. It's every internet troll going 'oh, you don't think these jokes are funny? Stop being so offended, snowflake!'
Like, even from the start, you get a bunch of stupid perverted voice-overs in the main character, Phil's, head as he's investigating this case from a hot woman puppet who says she's being blackmailed. In the first five minutes, she's already promising Phil she'll have sex with him if he solves her case. Calm down, movie, god; we barely have characters defined yet. And they don't waste time getting to a puppet sex shop, either, which only leads to more embarrassingly bad jokes. Get it? It's puppets, but they're talking about super raunchy things! It's funny because puppets are usually for kids! Do you get it yet?
I guess Melissa McCarthy is playing this other detective who has bad blood with Phil. You can tell because they argue and fight like idiot children every time they're on screen, bringing the plot to a screeching halt several times, spitting terrible roast jokes and insults at each other. Some of the backstory is shoved obnoxiously in your face... apparently, years and years ago, Phil was the first and only puppet cop and he was unable to kill this guy who had captured McCarthy. Then everyone thought he did it on purpose because 'puppets don't shoot puppets.' And then puppets were forever banned, by law, from becoming cops anymore.
All of this shit just shows how bad the writers were at crafting a plot. Really, none of it makes sense. What parallels are there to real life at all? Why would they ban all puppets from being cops or think he did it on purpose? It's never really clarified, instead just made out to be some kind of hamfisted racism allegory, because people all hate puppets in this world for some undefined reason. I guess I can see why they didn't care about plot; I mean a bunch of bad puppet sex jokes probably took a long time for them to come up with. They were probably too tired to make a plot.
The plot, if you can call it that, is that someone is killing off the cast of this old show called the Happytime Gang. Though the movie barely focuses on that. Instead we get a super long scene in this biker bar where McCarthy does puppet coke and fires a gun off a few times, then gets mad at some guy for using the word 'bitches' and beating the shit out of him for that. It's cute that this movie is seriously trying to shoehorn in a feminist message when everything else about it is trashy and low-brow as fuck. It's like if someone took a giant steaming shit on your car window but then lectured you about how you shouldn't say 'cunt' because it's rude.
Oh, and there's a hacky romance scene between Phil and his old girlfriend played by Elizabeth Banks where they talk about what could've been. Every fucking thing in this movie is playing the most rancid, tired detective movie cliches straight, without even trying to be satire. It's pretty amazing that I can't even tell if this movie is even a little bit self-aware. It seems to think it qualifies as 'satire' since they're trying to make jokes in the movie, but how does that make sense? Just having eggs and flour separately doesn't mean you've made a fucking cake.
Perhaps the real low point, though it's hard to choose, is the sex scene between Phil and the lady he accepted the case from, in which there's an extended scene of Phil ejaculating Silly String all over the place for far, far too long... I think Silly String should really reconsider how their product is used in media from now on.
I just can't believe any functioning adult wanted to put this in a movie. There are a bunch of people watching, too, including Phil's secretary Bubbles and a bunch of cops, and none of them seem to make much of a big deal out of it. Bubbles even grabs a bunch of cleaning supplies like this happens all the time. That's really why so much of this is such bad comedy – why would she stay around after the first time her boss jizzed all over his own office and made her clean it up? Just because it's a comedy doesn't mean you can just stop making any logical sense. Part of good comedy is people's reactions to bizarre or over the top situations. Here, this gross, weird nonsense is just treated like an every day thing.
The rest of the movie doesn't improve at all. More bad sex puppet jokes, and they throw in some physical gags about McCarthy's appearance for good measure, which is weird since I thought the movie was trying to be all feminist or whatever. But because it's comedy, it apparently doesn't have to make sense, so I guess I'm the jackass here.
Oh, and did you want to see a children's puppet portrayed as a strung out dying drug addict in a grimy, dark hellhole? You're in luck. The movie provides this soul-killing image with the exact amount of tact you've come to expect, which is none. Seriously, what reason would anyone have to want to see that image?
I guess they find out the real killer was that hot puppet lady from the very beginning, because the bullet Phil fired while trying to kill the guy who'd captured McCarthy accidentally killed her father all those years ago. It's a real stretch. But they make it work by not trying to give this character a personality in any way. Phew! That solves that problem!
The movie ends, finally and mercifully, with Phil asking out his secretary Bubbles, despite there being no romantic connection between the two at all for the entire movie. Does she even want to go out with him after she's had to literally clean up his jizz at the office multiple times? I guess it's consistent in that it's totally unfunny garbage just like literally every single other frame of the movie.
The jokes were bad, the story was bad, I really didn't see even one thing to like here. It's been a while since that happened. The humor in this is solely based on stupid juvenile shock value shit that is bad even by that standard. There's basically one joke idea: puppets swearing and talking about dirty things = funny. And it can't even do that remotely well. Everything in this is overly simplistic low-brow crap and doesn't try to use its creativity for anything but the easiest, lamest jokes possible.
It's actually kind of amazing how truly worthless this movie is, and I really doubt there will be anything worse this year. But if you like terrible jokes and no plot or character, go nuts with The Happytime Murders!
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