According to the British Board of Film Classification, Muppets Most Wanted is nearly 113 minutes long. For those who aren’t obsessed with film running times, that’s staggeringly long for a Muppet movie.
That’s about ten minutes longer than 2011’s The Muppets, which (at 103 minutes) was the only other one over 100. It’s just over 25 minutes longer than the 87-minute Muppets From Space, which is the shortest (not counting the 86-minute theatrical cut of MCC, but I think most fans agree that the 89-minute version with “When Love is Gone” is the definitive one). Most of the others are somewhere around 95 minutes, which seems just about perfect to me.
Now, that longer running time could be a good thing or a bad thing. My hope is that this means is they went ahead and left in everything important to tell their story. I love The Muppets, but it definitely suffers from being cut for time, especially in the case of “Let’s Talk About Me” (Tex Richman’s big song, which, surprisingly, is actually called “Let’s Talk About Me”). The longer version found on the soundtrack is over-the-top enough to be funny, and it also explains an important plot point, while the shorter one in the movie is just kind of embarrassing. I truly believe the film would be better with the full song (and with a resolution that didn’t feel like an afterthought). So whatever Most Wanted’s equivalent of that is, here’s hoping they went ahead and left it in.
On the other hand, 113 minutes is awfully long for a comedy. 85-105 minutes is generally a good rule of thumb, even if it’s one that has been ignored often in the past few years. 113 minutes is close to all of these two-hour rambling shaggy movies from Judd Apatow, who doesn’t seem to believe in the concept of editing. My fear is that this means scenes will stretch to the breaking point, as happens all too often in recent comedies. For example, I loved the first half of that scene in Bridesmaids where Kristen Wiig speeds past Chris O’Dowd a bunch of times in funny ways, but then I just got tired of it. I hope the filmmakers behind MMW have the good sense to know when enough is enough.
So that’s why some of us here at Tough Pigs are both excited and scared that the new Muppet movie is 113 minutes long.
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by Anthony Strand
