An average movie

Since this movie had a very weak reputation, I wasn’t expecting much but, since I have a weak spot for Elizabeth Banks, I thought I might as well check it out anyway. To be honest, I don’t think the damned thing was as original as it might seem. Indeed, Peter Jackson already did deliver with ‘Meet the Feebles’ a messed-up puppet feature oriented to the adult audience almost 30 years before this movie was made. Anyway, I still think that the concept had potential though but, unfortunately, pretty much nothing did worked in this movie after all. First of all, even though the story was not bad, it didn’t help that it felt like a terrible rip-off of ‘Who Framed Roger Rabbit’. Indeed, it was featuring a puppet and a human character (one of them was a private detective like Eddie Valiant was) investigating someone murdering some puppets and the puppet was involved with a femme fatale puppet called Sandra White. Sounds familiar, right? Another issue was that the 2 main characters were just terribly underwhelming. Phil Philips was voiced by Bill Barretta who apparently had a prolific careers voicing various muppets but, with all respect, his performance was rather flat here and someone with a more distinctive voice like Mickey Rourke for example would have been more suitable. Concerning Melissa McCarthy, it was even worse though. Indeed, she has spent pretty much a whole career playing such characters and this schtick has grown old a very long time ago. Finally, even though I didn’t mind the R rated tone, in the contrary, most of the jokes were more pathetic than really funny and/or entertaining. Anyway, to conclude, even though I don’t think it was such a misguided idea, it turned out to be really half-baked, I’m afraid it does it deserves its lame reputation and it is not really worth a look.