Movie Box Review

When it was announced that Disney's new movie of THE MUPPETS (the Mouse House bought the entire franchise from Jim Henson's company some years ago) was going to be written by Jason Segel and Nicholas Stoller, previously behind Forgetting Sarah Marshall (and Stoller also directed Get Him To the Greek), and directed by James Bobin of Da Ali G Show and Flight Of the Conchords, the prospect of a reboot both fun and a little bit subversive was tantalizing.  Perhaps those old felt darlings could come back to life, kick-started in the way Ron Moore had given new life to Battlestar Galactica or Chris Nolan to Batman (except, you know, a little less viciously dark).  A Muppets that was looser and more improvisational, yet still with enough wholesomeness for the entire family.

What The Muppets is instead is... a Muppets movie.  Which is absolutely fine for the 7-year old goofball in all of us, but a little lame if you were hoping for more.  

Segel and Stoller have smartly approached the comeback of the Muppets with a story about the fuzzy crew needing exactly such a comeback.  In the story, the Muppets have mostly gone their separate ways:  Kermit still lives in their now disapidated mansion, but Miss Piggy has become a fashion editor, Fozzy performs in a Muppet tribute band, and so on.  When evil zillionaire Tex Richman (Chris Cooper) plans to seize the land of the old Muppet Studios for the oil beneath it, the Muppets can only regain control by, darn it, getting back together and putting on a show.  

The hokiness of all this, of course, is deliberate, and perfectly in keeping with Muppet tradition.  Where things go more than a little overboard is with the introduction of the major new characters:  human Gary (Segel) and his Muppet brother Walter (the story of how that came about would probably have been more interesting than this movie), as well as Gary's longtime girlfriend Mary (Amy Adams), who naturally only exists in order to long for Gary to propose to her.  (Lest we worry that Gary and Walter share a man-felt love that truly dare not speak its name.)  When the three of them go on a trip to Hollywood, they become the catalysts for the Muppet reunion.  These three characters are so aw-shucks sweet and laboriously naive that the Muppets themselves seem like Quentin Tarantino characters in comparison.  Despite some bright songs (especially one for Gary and Walter by Bret McKenzie, also of Conchords, that's probably the highlight of the entire movie), the three are all utterly one-dimensional and tiresome, without enough wit to be self-parodies.  That's particularly disappointing in Adams' case, because in Enchanted she did such a wonderful job of both embodying and satirizing family musical conventions at once, while Segel is just dull.  Bobin's direction, conservative throughout, lets these scenes play out in broad sit-com style.

That doesn't mean there's no fun to be had at The Muppets.  For one thing, the return of the lovable Muppets themselves is certainly welcome, even though it's odd not to hear Jim Henson's and Frank Oz's voices coming from Kermit and Piggy (it's the same feeling you get watching one of the modern day Looney Toons shorts that don't have Mel Blanc's legendary vocals).  There are also some clever celebrity cameos, like Emily Blunt as Piggy's assistant and Zach Galifianakis as a member of the show audience.  (And also more than a few utter throwaways, like appearances by Selena Gomez and Modern Family's Rico Rodriguez.)  Chris Cooper even gets to rap, quite possibly the last thing anyone ever expected to see him do on screen.

The Muppets is harmless and mildly enjoyable, with the emphasis on "mild."  It's the anti-Hugo:  one may be too Tiffany for many kids, while the other is a little too happy to be Wal-Mart.

In Hollywood, the word "sequel" is often code for "remake."  This isn't news:  the James Bond series has been going on for almost 50 years, and allowing for the occasional change in cast and some fluctuation in quality, it's pretty much been the same movie repeated over and over again (Hey look, it's Q with the gadgets!).  So one can't really blame Warner Bros and director Todd Phillips for essentially duplicating their giant success with The Hangover ($467M worldwide) 2 years later by giving us the putative sequel THE HANGOVER PART II.

And by duplicate, I mean a copy so close to the original that if they didn't already own the copyright, the filmmakers could be sued for infringement.  Not only is Phillips back as director and co-writer (this time with Craig Mazin and Scot Armstrong) and the core cast (Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms, Zach Galifianakis, Justin Bartha, Ken Jeong) reassembled, not only is the basic storyline the same, but the "changes" are basically just swaps of one detail for another.  The only real difference is one of location; with an eye to the international market (the first film only made 41% of its total gross overseas--come on, guys, Warners must have said, you can do better!), we're in Bangkok instead of Vegas.  But it almost doesn't matter, since the cities are used in exactly the same way, for their linked associations with outrageous excess and dirty secrets. 

The groom-to-be this time is Stu (Helms), who's marrying a Thai-American girl, the Heather Graham character from Hangover having vanished.  Phil (Cooper) is again the swinging ringleader of the group, and Alan (Galifianakis) the odd man-child who's along for the ride and incapable of keeping himself under control.  Again a spare member of the pre-wedding group goes missing, although this time it's the bride's brother (Mason Lee)--but the movie is so intent on following the original slavishly that Doug (Bartha), the original lost boy, is still kept off-screen for most of the film.  Where the first movie had the gang saddled with an unknown baby, this time it's a monkey; where Stu suffered knocked-out teeth 2 years ago, now he's got a Tyson-like facial tattoo.  They've upped the ante on the transgressive act involving one of them, but deleted the good-natured hint of romance that Graham's hooker provided in the original.  Jeong is again semi-nude and outrageous, Helms provides new lyrics for a song... I could go on; suffice it to say that the script here was less an act of creative writing than an exercise in painting-by-numbers.

None of this makes Hangover II bad--after all, there's a reason they're still churning out Bond movies after 50 years.  The cast continues to be terrific together, and even where the story beats are predictable, the little twists and reactions (particularly from Galifianakis) make them work.  Also, Phillips is one of the few current comedy directors to have a strong sense of visual style; his work with cinematographer Lawrence Sher is atmospheric and handsome (compared to Bridesmaids, Hangover II practically looks like Barry Lyndon).  The picture has the benefit of the same crackerjack story structure as the original, so it meanders and drifts far less than films from the Apatow school of comedies do.  It's all just a little tired.  Watching the film with a sold-out crowd, there's surprisingly little loud laughter, and what there is seems to be expressing fond familiarity more than the surprising hilarity of the first film.

Because the differences between the movies are so minute, after a while one watches Hangover II for the tonal changes that occasionally appear--it's like going to see a favorite band play a live show, and hearing a new riff in one of their old hits.  There are brief moments in this film that suggest a darker, even deeper story about friendship and manhood could have emerged, bits where the picture almost seems ready to suggest that these guys aren't the easygoing heroes we know, and that they might genuinely not like each other all that much.  But those kinds of implications are bad for business, and Hangover is a franchise.  Maybe in Hangover V (set in Rio?), we can look forward to a revisionist reboot.

Worth a ticket.

In movies, as in life, when someone is offered an illicit miracle drug that seems too good to be true, it usually is. So the general narrative arc of LIMITLESS doesn't come as a huge surprise. What is surprising is that Neil Burger's film, predicted to be the highest opener this weekend, manages to be enjoyable, if more than a little silly, fun.

Our hero is Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper, in his first real leading role), who might as well have a huge "L" stenciled on his forehead. He's an aspiring writer who can't make himself actually write, a slob, a drinker, and he's already failed at marriage and is about to ruin his longterm relationship with the lovely Lindy (Abbie Cornish). Then one fateful day his ex-brother-in-law and sometime drug dealer (Johnny Whitworth) offers him a clear pill that will change his life. In 30 seconds, Eddie is using 100% of his brain's capacity: finishing his novel is a snap, learning languages no challenge, and mastering the intricacies of high finance his new calling. He becomes an advisor to one of the world's richest men, the wonderfully named Carl Van Loon (Robert DeNiro), on a giant merger... and that's when things start to go bad. Like Cliff Robertson's title character in Charly, Eddie finds out that drug therapy can't solve everything. But unlike that kind of moralistic fable, Leslie's Dixon's script (based on Alan Glynn's novel "The Dark Fields") is bracingly dry and cynical, with plenty of gratuitously effective violence--it becomes the PG-13 equivalent of a Crank movie--and scheming that starts with double-crosses and mounts from there.

Burger's previous films Interview With the Assassin, The Illusionist and The Lucky Ones, with their relatively indie sensibilities, didn't suggest how goofily effective a commercial moviemaker he could be, and Cooper has the movie-star knack of keeping his charisma on display even while his character is being dragged progressively down. DeNiro has relatively little to do, but it's a relief not to see him in a Focker movie, and Abbie Cornish and Anna Friel are good as the women in Eddie's life. Worthy of particular note is Andrew Howard, who takes the incredibly cliched role of an evil Eastern European gangster and manages to do something amusing wth it; it's like he'd wandered in from a Guy Ritchie picture. The title may be a bit overstated, but this is a picture that successfully exceeds its seeming limits.