Muppets Most Wanted, announced as the seventh sequel in a clever opening song, takes the iconic puppets on a whirlwind tour of Europe for the first time. Kermit and his friends are convinced by tour manager Dominic Badguy to perform in Europe after the rousing success of their comeback at the end of 2011's The Muppets. However, international criminal mastermind Constantine, himself a green frog, swaps places with Kermit in a grand scheme to steal the crown jewels of England. Comedy ensues. The great dividing factor on your reaction to Muppets Most Wanted is how much you enjoy musicals. Do you like the Muppets and musicals? Then you'll love Muppets Most Wanted. Do you prefer there not to be an original song in almost every scene of your Muppets film experience? Then you probably won't fall for Muppets Most Wanted. It really is as simple as that.
Academy Award winner Bret McKenzie is back again with six brand new songs, plus a few old favorites and even the opening number of A Chorus Line, to make Muppets Most Wanted a bonafide spy musical comedy. The songs are even more specific to the plot than his work on The Muppets. Even more exciting, no two original songs are the same genre. Everything from theatrical patter to disco is covered in under two hours. It's impressive in variety and cohesion.
The newest Muppets sequel packs more celebrity cameos than usual to much more mixed effect. Each major city in Europe has a complimentary guest star for the live show (ie: Christoph Waltz in Germany), but they don't even bother to introduce the celebrity guest star in the Dublin performance. Some guests have perfectly appropriate one-liners (like Lady Gaga singing about cameos dressed in a very Lady Gaga manner) while others are wasted on silent or background characters that just pull focus in the "who and why was that?" way.
Fortunately, it's the core cast of Muppets and actors that carry the film. Ricky Gervais, as Badguy, plays off of the ensemble Muppets, encouraging individual freedom over a cohesive variety show at every turn. Tina Fey, as the leader of the Siberian gulag, works with a cast of prisoners and Kermit through the B-plot of Kermit surviving off the strength of his Muppet family. And Ty Burrell, as the French investigator going after the museum heists, does a good cop/incompetent cop routine with Sam the Eagle on the C-plot. That's it. The rest is all the Muppets, front and center, going through the growing pains of new found popularity all over again.
Muppets Most Wanted is everything you want in a Muppets film. It's silly, it's smart, and it's driven by the actual role of the Muppets in pop culture. It pushes everything that worked about The Muppets reboot film to the extreme. There are more songs, more old gags, more cameos, and a much more ridiculous plot with cartoonish villains and foils everywhere. The whole thing is just fun.
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