“It’s like MIAMI VICE, except Crockett’s a Muppet!”
If you are immediately tickled by the idea of a buddy-cop movie set within a world with sentient, talking puppets, well, you’re not alone.
The Jim Henson Company have been developing THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS for almost a decade now, and have found their star in the guise of Academy Award-winning plantation liberator and alcohol blamer, Jamie Foxx.
Foxx will play Edwards, a human detective who is paired up with “a crass, hard-drinking puppet” to solve a score of puppet-related murders surrounding a TV show called “The Happytime Gang.” The Gang are a family-friendly bunch on-camera, but live shameful, tabloid-exposed lives offscreen, and Foxx and his partner have to dig through the mess that is the cast’s personal lives to end the killings.
I’m getting the sense that Foxx would mostly be playing straight man to his showier, “drinker and philanderer” puppet partner, which falls into line with a lot of the roles he takes these days (WHITE HOUSE DOWN, ANNIE, DREAMGIRLS, even COLLATERAL and DJANGO UNCHAINED). Having a star of Foxx’s caliber instantly makes this seem more legit/commercial than it would’ve with just the “muppets and cops” logline, and it’s super-cool that he’d even be down with something like this. There’s no guarantee this sorta thing will work, particularly with mass audiences (must we cull examples from Henson’s own filmography?), and I applaud Mr. Foxx for taking what seems to be his biggest risk in years.
The last raunchy puppets movie I can remember is Peter Jackson’s MEET THE FEEBLES over 20 years ago, but with SAUSAGE PARTY reinvogorating the adult animation genre, why can’t there be room for movies with puppets that aren’t afraid to put bottles of hard alcohol in their hands?
