Muppets Most Wanted: James Bobin

James Bobin's Muppets Most Wanted is a vastly superior film to The Muppets (2011) if only by the virtue of the fact that the film is actually about the Muppets. Muppets Most Wanted is the Muppets film that I have been waiting for for years: smart, funny, inventive, touching, and full of great musical numbers (except for one bizarre duet between Miss Piggy and Celine Deon that leaves the audience wondering if the filmmakers accidentally forgot to edit in a crucial punchline). The film is a send-up of the Muppets caper films of the early 80s: the Muppets embark on a world-wide tour after Kermit is kidnapped and replaced by Constantine, the world's most dangerous frog, who uses their shows as distractions while he and his subordinate, the "Lemur," rob Europe's greatest museums and vaults in an attempt to find hidden clues about how to steal the crown jewels of Great Britain. The various subplots are genuinely delightful: Kermit's attempts to escape from a prison in Siberia where he is mistaken for Constantine, the Muppets realizing that Kermit was what kept the show from collapsing into itself, and Sam Eagle teaming up with his European counterpart, Jean Pierre Napoleon, to catch Constantine (seriously, could we just have a movie of these two running around America and Europe?). The film's tongue-in-cheek (or is it mole-on-cheek?) nature helps keep its self-referential parodies from collapsing in on themselves. I've heard that some people thought that there were too many musical numbers. But if all of the musical numbers are excellent (barring the aforementioned Deon duet), what's the problem? I was a bit bothered by the film's use of CGI during sequences where Constantine danced around and used martial arts on hapless prison guards. After all, the Muppets are one of the last bastions of traditional special effects in all of Hollywood. But Bobin said in an interview that "if we are doing CG compositing...we always have puppeteers perform it. We never go down the road of having a full CG character, which you could easily do. It feels that the joy of this movie is the Muppets exist. They're real; you can touch them." And if that's the case, then I can forgive the film for that.

8/10