North Texas Daily

“The Happytime Murders” follows puppet Phil Philips, who is a disgraced detective turned-private eye, and cop Connie Edwards (played by Melissa McCarthy) as they seek to uncover the mystery surrounding the deaths of an ‘80s puppet TV show cast.

This is literally the plot of the movie — I am not even joking.

This had the potential to be the next “Team America: World Police” or even just a raunchy Muppet movie we all kind of really wanted to see but never wanted to admit to ourselves.

Unfortunately, “The Happytime Murders” never lives up to its own insane premise and only ever really settles for being plain average.

With a plot like this, it desperately needed to be as wild, crude and inane as its trailer makes it out to be, but it never really once lived up to what it should have been.

I cannot stress enough how imaginative and creative this plot is. “The Happytime Murders” plays out like a deranged Muppet skit that got into the hands of the makers of “Sausage Party.” However, it never goes to those bizarre “Sausage Party” heights, though it desperately needed to and failed to do so, even when the opportunity presented itself.

McCarthy has made some spotty choices with her roles in the past few years, but I will always say she seems to be giving it everything she has in each one, even if the materials she is given never seem to be able to match up to her talents. Unfortunately, this film is yet another case of that exactly: McCarthy gives a good performance here, no doubt — I was laughing along with her almost every time she was on-screen, which was a nice turn given some of her recent projects I have seen.

Thankfully, I did laugh quite a few times during the film. I was at least hoping for some good laughs, and while there are certainly quite a few, there were never any that made me laugh out loud. Considering the premise of this thing, I definitely should have, and there should have been more jokes to sustain its already brief running time.

The movie’s major problems lay within its script, however. The lack of quality jokes, the bad one-liners and the overabundance of the F-word are all found in its script. The talent in front of the camera and behind the camera was all there ready to fire off on all cylinders, but the script is the thing that seemed to be left in the dust and never quite seemed to be able to catch up to everything else.

I do give massive props to the filmmakers here, though. During the end credits of the film, clips of how the film was made were shown, and man, it looked like a lot of work. I’m sure it took many painstaking hours to make this movie, and the sense of imagination is very prevalent.

Everyone’s heart seemed to be in the right place when producing “The Happytime Murders,” but the execution just was not really there. It is a shame because this thing could have really been something else, but it just was not.

Grade: 2.5/5

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