The murder mystery in The Happytime Murders, like the mystery in many film noirs, is just an excuse to poke around the edges of society and see which demons pop out of the shadows. The cute puppets in Brian Henson’s film reveal themselves to be porn addicts, drug addicts, plastic surgery addicts, sex addicts and worse. That’s the joke, and a lot of the time it’s funny. But it’s not just raunchy, it’s the point of the story.The puppets in The Happytime Murders are second-class citizens, subject to marginalization wherever they go. Unlike Who Framed Roger Rabbit, which presented a world in which cartoons were real but (almost) all of them were innocent, The Happytime Murders argues that puppets - and by extension, puppeteers - are complex, flawed, and even tragic people.
They may be entertaining but the attitude from audiences and studios alike is that they are disposable entertainment (literally, since hardly anyone bats an eye when they’re murdered), and that’s unjust and cruel. Literally and figuratively.
And so we get The Happytime Murders, an extreme reaction to the state of the mainstream puppet art form. Henson has this one opportunity to tell an adult-oriented puppet story that entertains but also has something meaningful to say. It’s heavy on sexual humor and violence because subtlety won’t make the point that puppets can be used to tell stories that aren’t family-friendly. It’s weird and crazy because there was no other option.As a result, The Happytime Murders isn’t nuanced. It’s a blunt instrument. But it’s mostly effective. Bill Baretta and Melissa McCarthy are talented comedians who know how to make their sillier jokes feel like extensions of their characters and the (relatively absurd) reality in which they live. The film’s constant juxtaposition between serious sex and violence and cuddly puppet imagery is usually amusing, sometimes hilarious, and it only occasionally looks like Henson is trying way too hard to be offensive, at the sacrifice of the story and characters.
In short, Brian Henson didn’t knock it out of the park, but he made his point. The exceptional puppeteering and mostly clever screenplay make a statement, and more-or-less prove that the artists behind The Happytime Murders are skilled craftspeople whose talents aren’t being appreciated or utilized nearly enough. They are mature, even though their jokes are frequently immature as all hell.
