‘The Happytime Murders’ Reviews Hilariously Tear These Muppets To Pieces

There’s that old saying, “If it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, and quacks like a duck, then it probably is a duck.” And if you watched the trailers and various other TV spots and ads for Melissa McCarthy’s “The Happytime Murders” and thought, “Man, that movie looks stupid and unfunny” then use your best instincts because from what critics are saying, it’s definitely stupid and unfunny.

READ MORE: ‘The Happytime Murders’: It’s Zero Sesame, All Street In The Latest NSFW Trailer

The Chicago Tribune might have summed it up perfectly by saying, “’The Happytime Murders is a one-joke movie, minus one joke.”

As for other reviews from major outlets, the quotes are a bit more…harsh. EW’s review was not very complimentary, saying, “…it’s a botched experiment that inexplicably wastes a profanity-spewing Melissa McCarthy and is hobbled by a lead character (chain-smoking puppet PI Phil Phillips) who resembles Guy Smiley crossed with Jerry Orbach and whose deadpan monotone (provided by Bill Barretta) is likely to put you to sleep.”

Vanity Fair killed the film, with a headline saying it might be the “worst film of the year.” The review was obviously not kind: “Not a single bit lands in The Happytime Murders. McCarthy sometimes comes close, as does Rudolph — but what surrounds them is so aggressively, lamely crass that it would take a true Herculean effort to elevate anything in the film to laugh-worthy. And so, one must sit through The Happytime Murders in rigid silence, as puppets are killed and groped and seduced and exploited to the point that I started to feel bad for them, before remembering that none of it was real and nobody had to make this if they didn’t want to.”

io9 was also merciless, saying, “…the result is a sad hodgepodge of half-baked ideas sewn together with an undercooked story, riding on the hope that lots of dirty jokes could bring the whole thing together. They fucking don’t.”

Screen Crush’s review says, “The world could certainly use a good laugh right now, not humorless dreck where puppets are stand-ins for lazy commentaries on racism.”

And those are just the tip of the iceberg. The Guardian, the New York Times, Slash Film, and others are just as bad. Of course, there are a few outliers talking about how the film at least partly succeeds, but if you’re looking to spend some hard-earned money this weekend, and your “Spidey Sense” was telling you to avoid this film, it looks like you might have been right.

Sadly, it appears the funniest part about “The Happytime Murders” might be the reviews that roast it…

Here are some of the more interesting tweets about the film, as well (you know, to give a full picture of the apparent awfulness):

https://twitter.com/davidehrlich/status/1032372376422383616

https://twitter.com/RebeccaPahle/status/1032380168231301120

THE HAPPYTIME MURDERS is a great example of a movie that is just absolute horseshit, a felt-noir bête noire with more ejaculatory gags than you can shake a jizzing puppet penis at! https://t.co/r47KLqEbv4

— Charles Bramesco (@intothecrevasse) August 22, 2018

the most diplomatic thing I can say about The Happytime Murders is that it is *exactly* the movie promised in the trailer.

— Angie J. Han (@ajhan) August 23, 2018

Zero stars. ZE-RO. My Sadtime review of “The Happytime Murders.”
https://t.co/bOn4UNfXv0

— Richard Roeper (@RichardERoeper) August 23, 2018

I wanted to revel in #HappytimeMurders, but it's exasperatingly terrible. https://t.co/8UM05RQRTc

— Kristy Puchko (@KristyPuchko) August 22, 2018