Review: Muppet Treasure Island

      In 1996, my parents bought me the Muppet Treasure Island computer game. I played that game repeatedly. So much so that after a while, I was able to beat the game (consisting of three CD-ROMs) in about half an hour. It was a great game based on a movie which in turn was based on a book. Robert Louis Stevenson's Treasure Island has been made into a movie four times between 1934 and 1990, with such greats as Charlton Heston and Orson Welles playing the peg-legged scoundrel Long John Silver. This time the Muppets take over this classic swashbuckling tale. Fresh off the success of 1992's A Muppet Christmas Carol, the heirs to Jim Henson must have thought they found their new formula for success: take classic stories and recast them with a mix of humans and muppets. How could it fail?

Basically, it can't.

       Your enjoyment of this movie will depend on your enjoyment of the muppets. That has been true for every muppet movie since the beginning. The story is essentially unchanged from the Stevenson classic. An old pirate named Flint buries a treasure on an island. A boy named Jim Hawkins is given a map to the treasure and sets off to find it (this time accompanied by Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat). They receive funding for their journey from Squire Trelawney (Fozzie Bear) which allows them to buy the use of a ship captained by Kermit the Frog. Also aboard the ship is Tim Curry as Long John Silver, Curry at this point in his career has perfected over-the-top performances such as these. He was the lead in Rocky Horror after all. Silver is determined to have the treasure for himself and backed by the rest of the ship's crew tries to overthrow Kermit's captaincy. Upon arriving to the island, we find that Flint had left someone behind: Benjamina Gunn (in the original story it's just Ben Gunn) played by Miss Piggy who has since become the queen of the island's native warthog population. This could be a sly reference to another classic island novel, Lord of the Flies, which has its own warthogs and a character named Piggy.

       The musical numbers in this film are a real treat, especially the rollicking “Cabin Fever,” which has always been my favorite. However, I'm not particularly a fan of when the young Kevin Bishop (playing Jim Hawkins) sings his solos, but everyone else is enjoyable. The movie succeeds most in the earlier parts of the film, before things get too big. The ship provides a smaller space, segmented in a way that is beneficial to the muppets. Once on the island, the muppets are in a much more open space in which they don't feel quite right. Large action scenes aren't really the muppets forté, they do much better in the smaller scale. Part of this is I'm not quite sure how I feel about being able to see muppets standing freely on their own. Kermit and company are being controlled by puppeteers (muppeteers?) and it's a little strange to not be able to immediately figure out how they are doing the puppeteering (muppeteering?). The script also isn't quite as tightly written as A Muppet Christmas Carol was, and with much of the screen time being filled by the inexperienced Bishop, it hurts the film a bit. However the muppets make full use of their time on screen delivering plenty of great gags. Personally, my favorite muppets are Statler and Waldorf and the Swedish Chef, who are given very limited roles here, but definitely shine when they are on screen. Curry also does a great job acting along with the muppets which, as evidenced by the likes of Orson Welles and Michael Caine, is no mean feat. In the end, this is a good muppet movie, but not a great one.