The Great Muppet Caper (1981)

Director: Jim Henson

Another fun muppet movie, though one that I found to be a little too heavy on the musical numbers for my liking.

As part of our Coronavirus quarantine, my wife and I have not been above goofy, escapist movies. And even before the current quarantine, late last year, we had a good time re-watching the original The Muppet Movie. In this state of mind, we fired up The Great Muppet Caper, a film that I saw probably no less than a dozen times as a kid but hadn't watched in well over 30 years.

Rather than trying to continue the story told in The Muppet Movie, this one just takes the same basic characters and plugs them into a different tale. Here, Kermit and Fozzie are twin brothers (a hilariously nonsensical plot point of which the film is completely aware) who are a budding reporter duo. They chase a story of a jewel thief across the Atlantic, to England, where they become embroiled in the thief's shady plans, while Kermit meets Miss Piggy, an aspiring model. Along the way, the entire crew of familiar Muppets get involved for one reason or another, culminating in the gaggle of strange characters managing to foil the attempted theft of a nearly priceless diamond.

This one still has plenty of laughs for adult fans like me and my wife. Part of the fun is having decades-dormant memories jogged by certain jokes, physical gags, or iconic moments in the movie. There was one particularly subtle suicide joke that I found hilarious when I was about 8 years old but hadn't thought of since about 1983. Not that I knew it was a suicide joke back then - I was laughing at the goofy voice acting of the scene back then - but it was quite an experience to have a latent memory like that brought back to the surface. Oh, and that scene is still pretty damn funny to my 44-year-old self. There were more than a few moments like that upon this revisiting of the movie.

My favorite celebrity cameo in this one - Peter Falk as a
self-absorbed bum who takes a weird stab at helping Kermit
feel better.

Compared to The Muppet Movie, I found Caper to be a slight dropoff, mostly because there seemed to be far more musical numbers, some of which went on for several minutes. I'm generally not a big fan of musicals, so I found myself mostly waiting for the tunes to end and the regular zaniness to continue.

The overload of songs aside, the rest of the movie has plenty of gags that are right on par with some of the best moments of the TV show or the original movie. And of course, there are several solid celebrity cameos, though not as many as the 1979 movie. Charles Grodin is great as the villainous thief (who also falls in love with Miss Piggy), and we even get John Cleese, Peter Ustinov, and others. But the best is probably an uncredited Peter Falk as a know-it-all vagrant who tries to have a heart-to-heart with a disconsolate Kermit.

This is still a fun one for parents with young kids, or adults who don't mind some goofy family humor. These types of movies are rarely made anymore, but this one still holds up nicely.