Review of Muppets Most Wanted (2014) by Andrew C. D — 17 Jun 2016

Picture a goofy song and dance musical partially that takes place in Auschwitz, and uses the concentration camp and enduring tragedy as a source of gags and jokes. Distasteful? Yes, and yet when the Muppets Most Wanted use the Soviet Gulags, which have a kill count of 2-3 times that of the Nazi concentration camps, as a springboard for jokes, nobody really cares.

The leading humans have boring roles as written, so there's no much room for judging their performances there, but Jason Segel also had a very plain role in The Muppets, which he managed to fill in with his charisma and attention to performing detail. Ricky Gervais has only his trademark snide attitude to fill in a role with, which comes off as bad as you might expect.

The songs were written by Bret McKenzie, who won an Oscar for his previous effort on The Muppets, but appears to have given much less effort in this endeavor. The strongest song in this movie by a large margin is "Together Again" from The Muppets Take Manhattan.

Rod Serling, who understood the narrative possibilities of tragedy and fear better than anyone finished a script with the following: "All the Dachaus must remain standing. The Dachaus, the Belsens, the Buchenwalds, the Auschwitzes-all of them. They must remain standing because they are a monument to a moment in time when some men decided to turn the Earth into a graveyard. Into it they shoveled all of their reason, their logic, their knowledge, but worst of all, their conscience. And the moment we forget this, the moment we cease to be haunted by its remembrance, then we become the gravediggers. Something to dwell on and to remember, not only in the Twilight Zone but wherever men walk God's Earth.".