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.

 Worth A Ticket:  Grade It On A Curve

In 1999, Jake Kasdan directed a project set in high school that starred Jason Segel and featured Dave (Gruber) Allen in its ensemble; it was called Freaks and Geeks, and it has its own special place in pop culture history.   His new BAD TEACHER... not so much.  But not everything has to be a classic, and Bad Teacher, despite its shortcomings, isn't a bad way to spend 90 minutes in the summertime.

Cameron Diaz has been in so many terrible movies (do you even remember her in Green Hornet?  OK, fine--do you even remember Green Hornet?) that she seems delighted to have a role she can chomp down on, and her pleasure is infectious.  She plays Elizabeth Halsey, who when we meet her seems to have accomplished her life plan:  cutting short her desultory high school teaching career by marrying rich.  But in short order, she finds herself dumped (coincidentally, Kasdan's pilot for the fall sitcom New Girl also begins with the sudden end of a seemingly perfect relationship), and forced to go back to teaching.  Depressed and bitter, she mistreats her class with a vengeance, alternating between sneaking swigs from a bottle in her desk drawer and sniping at any students who dare to speak.  Her colleagues, who include Lucy Punch, Segel and Phyllis Smith, are also targets of her sarcastic wrath.  But when a wealthy, idealistic new teacher (Justin Timberlake) arrives, she has a new goal:  steal, embezzle and otherwise cheat her way to the money that will pay for the boob job she's convinced will attract him.

Bad Teacher is neither as funny nor as daring as its red-band trailer suggested--Elizabeth crosses lines, but she doesn't do anything truly awful (she's a kitten compared to Billy Bob Thornton in Bad Santa), and she predictably becomes A Better Human Being before the movie is over.  The movie's got charm, though.  The script by Gene Stupnitsky and Lee Eisenberg (producer/writers on The Office) may lurch between silly plot points, but it's got plenty of tasty dialogue, and Diaz seems to relish every line.  She's an actress who can lift herself up to the level of her material (she was excellent in the terribly underrated In Her Shoes), and she throws herself wholeheartedly into this part.

Even better, the picture has been written and cast in depth.  Lucy Punch all but steals the movie as Elizabeth's nemesis, a goody-goody teacher who's like the grown-up version of Reese Witherspoon in Election; the obvious move would have been to play the character very big, but Punch smartly keeps her under control, steely and increasingly desperate in her contempt for Diaz.  Phyllis Smith does exactly what she does every week on The Office, and it continues to be very funny.  Segel's ultimate place in the storyline isn't hard to figure out, and his easygoing on-screen rapport with Diaz makes it work.  Timberlake, as usual, is happy to go for it in a comic role, but his character is the sketchiest (I kept expecting some kind of twist)--he'll be seen to far better advantage in Friends With Benefits a few weeks from now.  Even in small roles, people like John Michael Higgins,  Molly Shannon, Eric Stonestreet and Thomas Lennon show up to elevate them.  Kasdan gets credit for a lot of this, even if the picture looks like a single-camera sitcom (visually, it's somewhere between the stick-a-camera-in-front-of-people style of Bridesmaids and the genuine stylishness of The Hangover Part II); there's someone interesting to watch in every scene, and the picture has flow and energy. 

Bad Teacher is no masterpiece, and it doesn't have to be.  It's got a strong, charismatic lead, a terrific supporting cast and a few laughs, and that'll do. In a summer where, so far, the big action tentpoles have underperformed and the comedies (Bridesmaids, Hangover 2, Midnight in Paris) have been on the surest road to profit, it earns its place in the graduating class.