Muppets from Space (1999)

(In French, On Cable TV, December 2022) As someone who mistakenly thought that Muppets from Space was titled Muppets in Space, I spent far too much time wondering when the Muppets would actually get into space rather than playing host to alien visitors and realizing their own otherworldly origins. But that’s the Muppets movie we get—shenanigans about Gonzo realizing his real history, the Muppets leaguing against a national security research institute, and a finale featuring an alien ship landing on Earth. “Disappointed” is far too strong a word to describe my muted reaction to the result—“underwhelmed” is closer to it. While there’s enough here for a few chuckles, the humour of the earlier Muppet films isn’t there. The rather strange choice to make this a Gonzo-centric film and sideline the rest of the gang doesn’t help, but there’s also a lower joke-per-minute ratio and fewer imaginative set-pieces as well. It’s not much of a surprise, then, to find out that this was a commercial failure and hence the last of the first-generation Muppets movies before their revival in 2011—it clearly smacked of fatigue and lack of inspiration. (Behind the scenes, things were also not going well for the Jim Henson Corporation.)  Not that I would necessarily turn down another viewing of Muppets from Space at some point: even when operating at half-speed, the Muppets are still more fun to watch than many other family movies… whether they fly off to space or not.