Disaster of puppets.

Comedy is a genre born to shock. While the public’s taste for vulgar, gross-out humour may ebb and flow with time, it can be devastating tool if handled appropriately. Whether apple pie sex, balls caught in a tuxedo fly, or pretty much anything from the collective brain of Trey Parker and Matt Stone; the urge to shock has given us some of the most iconic comedy moments in cinema history. Quite simply, without this license to ruffle feathers, the genre would not exist as we know it.

Making us feel awkward is all part of comedy’s job and when utilised to its full potential, can be a thing of fist-gnawing beauty. But – and this is a huge but – there’s no bigger disappointment in cinema than shock for shock’s sake. Lowbrow, crass humour is all well and good but there’s most definitely a use-by date on that bad boy. Just ask the Farrelly brothers.

Without substance to back up your film’s shock tactics, it can all be a rather soul-destroying viewing experience and, despite the intriguing concept of spinning Jim Henson’s classic, child-friendly puppetry off into a sordid world of sex, drugs, and murder; it’s abundantly clear The Happytime Murders just doesn’t have the staying power to sustain its potential.

In a world of begrudging puppet and human co-existence, P.I. and disgraced ex-LAPD detective Phil Phillips makes it his mission to protect his fellow stuffed citizens from harm. When the puppet cast of an 80s TV show are murdered one by one, Phillips must reluctantly join forces with former partner Connie Edwards (Melissa McCarthy) for a deep dive into the seedy underbelly of Los Angeles to find the culprit before any more stuffing is shed.

For all its ambitions of puppetry transgression, the harsh reality is that The Happytime Murders isn’t half as shocking as it thinks it is. Further still, despite the initial novelty factor of having the Henson brand name attached to something so overtly adult, the end result feels painfully uninspired and, even worse, depressingly low on laughs.

Inverting the expectations of something as kid-friendly as puppetry has been done in everything from Avenue Q to Team America and, while the initial hope that the involvement of Brian Henson would inject the level of quality and authenticity his family name carries, The Happytime Murders sadly fails to bring anything remotely innovative or fresh to the table.

As with any film out to shock, being outrageous is all well and good, but if you can’t back it up with something substantial, you’re doomed to failure from the start. Initial impressions of The Happytime Murders were certainly intriguing, as the film found itself becoming its very own hype man with a boisterous marketing campaign full of confrontational taglines, gleefully filthy trailers, bold claims, and a lawsuit from Sesame Street they were only too happy to shout about, yet delivers on none of it.

Poorly constructed and painfully obvious, jokes come and go with barely a chuckle or an eyebrow raised, as they consistently fail to hit their desired target. The opportunities are certainly there to make good on the film’s many promises, however, rookie screenwriter Todd Berger and director Brian Henson massively struggle to make the most of either the undoubted talents of the film’s puppetry team or the human cast surrounding them.

Never allowing itself the time or space to build up anything remotely clever, the film’s script feels far too eager to ditch restraint altogether to shower us with a steady stream of pathetic dick, sex, body image, and (rather troublingly) women jokes that do nothing but smack of desperation. While a cute stuffed rabbit caught buying dirty magazines and a carrot-shaped sex toy in a puppet porn shop feels like a comedy goldmine in theory, like almost everything else in the film, the gag barely gets out of first gear.

The attempted laughs are as crude as anything we’ve seen before, yet The Happytime Murders has absolutely nothing to subsidise it with. Similar efforts like Sausage Party and Team America have swum in similar murky comedy waters before, however both easily outlived their novelty by offering a nuanced approach that, while buried under a mountain of cartoonish, lowbrow humour, struck just the right gross-out balance to stay ahead of the game. In comparison, The Happytime Murders burns through the intrigue of its setup in double-time to leave behind nothing but a humourless void.

While relying heavily on visual gags to get by, The Happytime Murders attempts to back up the gross-out slapstick with stilted, banter-based dialogue that regularly falls flat. It probably all read well on paper but, in the cold light of day, human and puppet characters throwing foulmouthed, bone-headed insults at one another ad nauseam just feels cringe worthy and disappointingly desperate, especially considering some of the comedic talent involved.

Quite frankly, you have to wonder what on earth the film’s most prominent human cast members, Melissa McCarthy and Maya Rudolph, are doing here in the first place. Both try their hardest with what they’re given, yet neither are able to resuscitate such shockingly limp material. In particular, it feels like we’re back to square one with Melissa McCarthy as she’s caught out with a script that sells her scandalously short yet again.

As abundantly talented as she is, there’s certainly been a worrying downward trend in McCarthy’s output for some time now, as the diminishing returns from Spy onwards have been alarming for someone who looked at her peak not too long ago. When given material to complement her natural talents, such as her breakthrough hit Bridesmaids, she’s an unstoppable force, yet The Happytime Murders feels like the worst kind of McCarthy comedy vehicle, relying heavily on lazy tropes and tired quirks to get by.

With no one to really bounce off, McCarthy is left high and dry as she attempts to extract any semblance of laughter from uninspired, borderline offensive jokes that, for some bizarre reason, revolve largely around her being mistaken for a man. As ever, the enthusiasm is always there but, like almost every other Melissa McCarthy film of the last few years, it’s nowhere near enough to lift the lacklustre material.

For their part, the film’s puppets are as impressive as one might expect from The Jim Henson Company (or at least an adult subsidiary thereof). The designs are basic, yet they work well for the washed up, threadbare aesthetic they’re going for. Everything feels suitably frazzled and frayed with the characters, as if we’ve stumbled down a shady alleyway at the wrong end of Sesame Street, adding a rare glimpse of something special in the heat of the film’s smouldering dumpster fire.

If nothing else, you just can’t knock the artistry involved in bringing these creatures to life and, while they’re nowhere near the quality of the Muppets, they fit the desired tone well enough. The goofy, spaghetti-limbed visual humour that comes with puppetry is absolutely ripe for comedy, especially when spun into something a little edgier than your average episode of The Muppets Show, yet the writers repeatedly let the hard work of the puppeteers go to waste with a script that just doesn’t know how to best utilise what’s at its disposal.

The sub-film noir, buddy cop storyline just smacks of laziness and feels wholly uninspired, coming and going with very little impact. As a concept, there are many places to take such an unhinged, oddball setup, yet Brian Henson and the screenwriters grab the easy option every single time with a narrative that lacks both the jaunty wit of The Muppets and the cerebral punch of Team America to end up drifting off nowhere in particular.

It’s never a good sign for any comedy when you can squeeze out more laughs from a two-minute blooper reel than the entire preceding hour and a half, yet that’s the sorry state we find The Happytime Murders in. Worse still, if the biggest compliment that can be given to your film is that it’s short, you really are deep in the brown stuff. In truth, the condensed running time is sweet relief from one of the most bitterly disappointing and infuriating comedies of recent years. With an unconventional concept, big star, and the renowned artistry of the Henson name behind you, The Happytime Murders really should be killing it; yet the novelty of the gross-out humour and the shock value of seeing puppets do naughty things gets old fast, leaving behind a comedy that’s as spineless and limp as the majority of its cast.