Headscratchers / Muppets Most Wanted

• Okay, so Nadya and the prisoners in the gulag figured out pretty quickly that Kermit was, in fact, not Constantine (big give-away: Constantine never says, "Thank you"), so aside from the obvious, "There wouldn't be a movie/plot" aspect, why didn't anyone let Kermit free and resume hunting Constantine down? I can see Nadya's obsession with him probably played a factor, but still, everyone else seemed to also know he wasn't really Constantine, so why keep him imprisoned over mistaken identity?
  • More than likely Nadya would've looked incompetent for having such a thing happen, so she kept it under wraps...also she had become obsessed with him, so you know how that is.
  • Well, it was more than obsession.
  • She kind of spelled it out. As long as he has that mole on his face, he's officially considered Constantine, so it's her job to keep him in jail even if she knows it's not true.
    • OP here. You're absolutely right, I had forgotten that little detail. It also seemed odd, because Kermit tried feverishly throughout the movie to remove the mole Constantine crazy-glued to his face, yet finally, during the attempted helicopter escape, Kermit was able to effortlessly remove it and slap it onto the other side of Constantine's face.
    • Two reasons for that:
    • 1. He'd spent the entire movie loosening it.
    • 2. By the movie's final scene, he was pissed about his friends, job, and girlfriend being stolen from him.
  • It's because of her obsession with Kermit. As long as he's officially considered Constantine, she can keep him there and do whatever she likes with him, I suppose. Don't read too much that part.
  • One wonders, though, why she didn't at least send out a few guards or something to find the actual Constantine while Kermit was in the gulag. Even if Kermit is considered to be Constantine, if she knows that an escaped convict is running around free, shouldn't she do something about it?
• Was Nadya obsessed with Kermit before he came to the gulag, or did the fascination spring purely from her interactions with him? She certainly didn't seem to react when she realized she had Kermit the Frog locked up in a cell, but later on, she reveals an incredibly decked-out Kermit shrine that looks like it probably took some time to build.
  • She didn't seem to start softening up towards him until after she kept thwarting his multiple escape attempts, and then he has a moment where he feels down in the dumps for seeing in the paper that his friends don't even seem to need or care about him anymore now that Dominic is handling things. From that moment on, Nadya progressively grew more sympathetic towards him, and it seemed to snowball from there. I maybe over thinking here, but I'm guessing maybe because she puts up with notoriously dangerous prisoners all day long (and probably has for a looong time), to have someone like Kermit, who actually has genuine feelings and emotions, probably touched something inside her.
  • When it really hit her is when he actually got pissed at the prisoners when they were just disregarding him during their Boyz II Men song. A guy that doesn't take crap suddenly becomes very attractive.
  • I think it's fair to say that she was obsessed with Kermit before he came to the gulag. After all, how else would that shrine be there? Something like that would take some time to make.
• Obviously the real reason is that it would ruin the plot, but it bugs me that there is no in-story justification for the Muppets to be cleared of suspicion after "Interrogation Song." Dominic and Constantine left an enormous amount of evidence in the form of demolished theater/museum dividing walls, and Constantine's alibi was made entirely of Blatant Lies that would fall apart if Sam and Jean actually did ask anybody else "who sang Rainbow Connection."
  • First of all, Constantine did sing the Rainbow Connection (off screen). As he said he had a water-tight alibi, because he was on stage while Dominic did the entire robbery in Berlin. All the destroyed walls were beneath the theater, not in it, meaning that a large number of people (including the audience) had the potential of committing the crime. Most importantly though, all the circumstantial evidence got thrown out the window when Sam and Jean deduced that the Muppets were simply too stupid to have committed the crime.
  • Also, every single muppet character in this movie except for Kermit, Constantine, Walter and Animal is a massive idiot. That's Explanation Number Two.
• So, Constantine destroyed the gulag ("It's time to light the lights!") when he escaped from it, right? So where did all the scenes with Kermit and Nadya take place? I mean, yeah, I'm sure Russia has more than one gulag, but the implication seemed to be that it was the same one that Constantine escaped from.
  • Either 1. they rebuilt it quickly 2. he only blew up parts of it or 3. there was another one conveniently located nearby they moved everyone into.
• Sam and Jean Pierre being absent during the "Together Again" finale.
• Sam going from his normal, member of the Muppets self in the last film to playing a character in this one. He says "Those weirdos, the Muppets" in one scene, but at no point do either he or the other Muppets act like they know each other - which is especially jarring when he arrests Kermit and Fozzie near the end. I was hoping there would be an explanation for his suddenly being a CIA Agent in the Unnecessarily Extended edition, but alas, it was not to be.
  • Yeah, that seems more like a plot convenience than anything else.
• Why on earth does the European police officer's car have its steering wheel on the American side?
  • Because in most of Europe we drive in the same side as the Americans, the left-hand traffic is mainly a British (and former British colonies like Australia and India) thing.
• As a European I don't fully understand some of the jokes made at the expense of the French police. I'm guessing they play with the way Americans perceive us, like how compact cars are more popular in Europe than in America. But what's with the running gag about breaks? You are under the impression we take too many breaks and holidays in Europe?
  • It may have to do with the European Union's proposed "Right to Vacation" law, in which the government has to pay for a citizen's tourism if they can't afford it. Also, there's the comparison between an average work-week in America and one in Europe. Americans have been estimated to work over 47 hours a week, opposed to France's 35-hour workweek.
• Um...what happened to Gary and Mary from the first movie? It's an Immediate Sequel but they've just vanished.
  • Yeah, they're not even mentioned which is weird, especially since Most Wanted is the first actual sequel.
  • It could be a stretch, but since the very first scene in the movie establishes that The Muppets was a fictional movie within this universe (at least to some degree), one could theoretically assume that Gary and Mary were fictional as well, similar to all the "fans".
  • Maybe they just went home.
• Does it bother anyone else that the Muppets just accepted that Kermit "had a cold" and that even Miss Piggy accepted "Badguy = 'good man' in French?" I swear, even a child could tell that Constantine wasn't Kermit without all those previous clips of him due to that accent, and you'd think that with Miss Piggy's regular use of French she'd be able to spot Dominic's Blatant Lies. It just seems like that borders on Too Dumb to Live, save for Animal.
  • One, it's just part of the convention of this type of plot. Kermit even calls them out on it near the end. Two, even in-universe it's somewhat justified: the entire beginning of the movie with Kermit's interaction with the rest of the Muppets is setting up how their egos and desire to get to do whatever they want - and Dominic's indulgence of these - are setting them all at odds with Kermit anyway. When Constantine shows up and, again, allows them complete freedom they're just happy to be given it so they don't necessarily question why they're suddenly being given it. And Miss Piggy's never really seemed the type to go beyond the "fashionable French" thing anyway. Plus, Sam and Jean repeatedly bring up how stupid the Muppets are. Long story short, this kind of plot always requires a serious case of Idiot Ball for it to work, and that's when it's meant to be taken 100% seriously. Part of the thing this film actually addresses is how awful it is that no one recognised the switch except Animal.
• Why didn't Nadya arrest the Muppets at the end? They harbored an escaped convict, and before Walter's big speech she didn't know that Constantine tricked them, she could have assumed that they were his accomplices. And Gonzo says that they "convinced themselves" Constantine was Kermit because he gave them what they thought they wanted - I could be wrong, but doesn't that imply that they knew that someone had stolen their friend's identity and didn't do anything about it?
  • Early in the movie, the Muppets were just too eager to perform their acts. When Kermit vetoed their requests, they turned to Dominic for his opinion. All the while, Constantine, posing as Kermit after getting the real Kermit arrested, allowed them to do whatever they wanted, and they went along with it, which led to disasters of their performances, but Dominic secretly gave out tickets and bribed journalists to write positive reviews, leaving them blissfully unaware. Later, once Constantine posing as Kermit proposes to Miss Piggy, that’s when they express concern of what will happen to the world tour and to them, and Constantine tells him that they don’t need him anymore, and he’s retiring to settle down, they start to feel that won’t be able to carry on without Kermit. And once Constantine is exposed, they all realized they all had been duped. So, they all had to learn the hard way how much they needed the actual real Kermit to guide them, which is why they try to atone for their mistakes by devoting their loyalty to him at the end when he is about to be arrested for escaping the Gulag (and Nadya probably wasn't even aware of Fozzie, Animal and Walter being there to help him).
  • That still doesn't explain why Nadya - or Sam and Jean, for that matter - didn't arrest the Muppets. Again, before Walter's speech she doesn't know that Constantine tricked them, for all she knew they were his accomplices. Also, if they went along with it, does that mean they knew that somebody had stolen Kermit's identity but didn't care?
  • There was no indication that the Muppets had even known they were harboring an escaped criminal. And after each of them being interrogated by Sam and Jean, they were deemed "too stupid" to be criminal masterminds. Later, Sam and Jean deduced that Fozzie was "The Lemur", but were proven wrong after the real one (Dominic) was caught. And witnessing their heroic effort in thwarting the two villains had clearly absolved their case. Gonzo stating that they convinced themselves Constantine was Kermit because he gave they thought they wanted, clearly indicates that they wouldn’t have done it otherwise, so they may not have necessarily known all along.
• Nadya has a pretty decent song near the beginning of the movie, but afterwards she supposedly can't sing to the point that they end the movie before she gets her 3rd shot to sing. Why did they make it that she can't sing while giving her one of the first songs of the movie?