THE VIRGINIAN-PILOT
Copyright (c) 1996, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: Tuesday, February 20, 1996 TAG: 9602200019
SECTION: DAILY BREAK PAGE: E1 EDITION: FINAL
TYPE: Movie Review
SOURCE: BY MAL VINCENT, MOVIE CRITIC
LENGTH: Medium: 69 lines
AS FAR AS I'M concerned, Miss Piggy, her frog Kermie, the Great Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat can score a hit just by showing up.
``Muppet Treasure Island'' is yet another diverting throwback to these icons of the 1970s and a reassuring assertion that they will be with us for at least another generation.
After a 10-year movie hiatus after 1984's ``The Muppets Take Manhattan,'' we rejoice over the new Muppet franchise. This fifth Muppet movie is the second, after ``Muppet Christmas Carol,'' directed by Jim Henson's son, Brian.
Perhaps the only major thing wrong with it is that Miss Piggy shows up so late in the film.
It is, though, an impressive entrance.
As Benjamina Gunn, the queen of the warthogs, she enters atop an elephant, as the natives beat out a rhythm. Wearing a leopard-skin sarong, trimmed with vulture feathers, the superstar seems primed for a great musical number. The star of stars, though, is short-changed.
Perhaps Frank Oz, her voice, doesn't want to work much now that he's a big-time director of mere humans.
There is compensation, though, in that the audience sees more of those famous Piggy legs than ever before. She and Kermit the Frog, her old boyfriend, sing a love song while hanging by their ankles from a cliff.
The surprising thing about ``Muppet Treasure Island'' is that the real stars are The Great Gonzo and Rizzo the Rat, who are cast as best friends of cabin boy Jim Hawkins. Borrowing only minimally from the Robert Louis Stevenson novel, Hawkins acquires a treasure map and is duped by a one-legged pirate named Long John Silver.
Kevin Bishop, the British child actor assigned to play Hawkins, is perilously close to becoming an irritant when he, in his high-pitched screech, gives choir boy renditions of several mediocre songs.
If you've got to be a human, Tim Curry comes off well enough with flashing teeth as the famed pirate Silver. Curry, after all, is something of a cartoon, best remembered as the transvestite from Transylvania, complete with fishnet stockings, in ``The Rocky Horror Picture Show.''
Kermit is relegated to a rather stuffy role as Captain Smollett who, even in the Stevenson novel was something of an upstanding, stodgy type rather than a dashing captain.
Instead of a parrot, Silver now has a talking lobster called Bad Polly on his shoulder. Polly proclaims, ``Talking lobsters? What's next? A singing, dancing mouse with his own amusement park?''
The irreverent barbs are the best. At one point, the stuffy wooden figurehead on the ship's bow blusters ``Here we are, stuck on the front of this ship'' as the other responds, ``It could be worse, we could be stuck in the audience.''
There are enough hoots to urge even the most stuffy adult to go ``Yo Ho Ho.'' As for those under 12, they'll love it. ILLUSTRATION: "MUPPET TREASURE ISLAND"
Rated: G
Starring: Kermit the Frog, Miss Piggy, the Great Gonzo, Rizzo the
Rat, Kevin Bishop
Mal's rating: ***
Benjamina Gunn (Miss Piggy) is reunited with Captain Smollett
(Kermit) in "Treasure Island."
by CNB