THE MUPPETS

title: THE MUPPETS
year: 2011
cast: Jason Segel, The Muppets
rating: **

The Muppets brought a generation of youngsters (myself included) out of Sesame Street and into a world where they didn’t feel like airhead children any longer. With THE MUPPET MOVIE, Kermit, Fozzie, Miss Piggy and the gang discovered each other on a cross-country adventure that was a true odyssey. But here we’ve mentally gone back to Sesame Street with some silly sing-alongs, flat jokes, and an unexciting journey out of a small town where resides Jason Segel, his school teacher girlfriend, and a puppet named Walter who loves watching – and relating to – the original TV series. They decide to take a trip to the Muppet studio, but it’s but a wasteland. And here they discover a greedy oilman wants to turn the dilapidated theater into his very own goldmine.

The trio find a melancholy Kermit and they head off to collect the remaining group throughout America and Europe. Thus the road trip begins, which could have (should have) taken most of the film like the original, but it’s but a fifteen-minute rushed romp where not much happens, leading to a big show where the Muppets have to raise ten million dollars to save their studio.

The Muppets themselves are all present, but they don’t do much nor are they individually vital to the story – but then again, there’s not much of a story to begin with. The fundraiser is a rushed montage of skits lacking what THE MUPPET SHOW had in creativity and humor. As for star/producer Jason Segel, whose effort to get the Muppets back together has merit, the result is too banal for what these characters, and their audience, truly deserve. The entire film centers on the long-lost nostalgia of the Muppets during the late seventies/early eighties, forgetting the movies made after the death of Jim Henson, which might have explained their departure. But perhaps Segel wanted to only remember the golden era; it's too bad he failed to recreate it.