The Muppets *****

Since I heard this film was being released, I have literally been counting down the days on my calendar. I remember being even shorter than I am now and going to the cinema to see the last Muppet movie, Muppets From Space; twelve years later it feels just as it did then. I haven’t left the cinema with a smile like that for a long time...twelve years maybe.

The unabashed joy of the Muppets goes much further back than my childhood of course; they’ve been going for thirty five years, and return in this movie acknowledging without shame that, well, they’ve been forgotten about since our childhood. Disbanded for years, the Muppets now pursue separate careers: Miss Piggy is editor of French Vogue, Fozzy is in a tribute band called The Moopets, Gonzo is a plumbing magnate, and Kermit sits and reminisces about the good old days in his Beverly Hills mansion. It takes their biggest fan, Walter (a Muppet who’s struggled in the human world), and his brother Gary (played by Jason Segel, who arguably is the Muppets biggest human fan and wrote this film with Forgetting Sarah Marshall director, Nick Stoller) to bring the Muppets back together. They must raise enough money to buy their studio back from an evil oil baron (Chris Cooper’s maniacal laughs and rap – yes, rap – are a major highlight).

A lot of the laughs come from the film’s ability to laugh at itself. The whole town fall into a dance break at the beginning of the movie, MGM musical style, but then collapse thankfully once the chirpy threesome have left for Hollywood. It screams, ‘I am a cheesey movie; you know it, we know it’ and reminds us how magical the movies can be if we just sit back and let it cast its spell. Amy Adams has always looked something of a Disney princess, and so is delightfully cast in this movie. The strained relationship between her and Segel parallels Kermit and Miss Piggy’s, and is played well against the Muppets’ otherwise comical plot. It’s insane how these unique furry friends are able to make you feel not only warm and fuzzy inside, but insanely good about yourself. The music is composed by Bret McKenzie of Flight of the Concords, and the Oscar winning song, ‘Man or a Muppet’ is genuinely both moving and amusing; by the time you reach this song, your heart is like warm putty in their little hands.

There are a few cameos from the likes of Whoopi Goldberg and Jack Black, but for this comeback, the real stardom is the Muppets’. I had never realised how much Cee Lo Green sounds like a flock of chickens or how much I missed Fozzy’s “Wacka wacka!”, for instance. The finale feels like a family reunion, and I’m about five years old all over again. In the state this country is in, it takes a pretty powerful movie for a whole audience to skip out singing ‘Everything is great, life’s a happy song’. The Muppets are back!