It must be difficult to follow 2011’s The Muppets, featuring Amy Adams and Jason Segal in a musical that delighted critics and fans alike. And Muppets Most Wanted certainly fell victim to that pressure early on, but a recent surge of positive reviews have seen the Ricky Gervais-starring film garner a more than respectable average on Rotten Tomatoes. 

Muppets Most WantedThe Muppets and Gervais out for dinner in Muppets Most Wanted

The film sees The Muppets embarking upon a world tour, hitting the iconic cities in Europe like Berlin, Madrid, Dublin and London. Things aren’t running smoothly for long, though, as the fuzzy friends find themselves embroiled in the middle of an international crime syndicate headed by Constantine, who’s the World's Number One Criminal, and just so happens to be the spitting image of Kermit the Frog.

MORE: 'Muppets Most Wanted' Soundtrack To Make Mayhem March 24th 2014

For Stephanie Zacharek of Village Voice, “The story matters only in that it creates opportunities for heaps of ridiculousness, and writer-director James Bobin (who also directed The Muppets), along with co-writer Nicholas Stoller, mines them skillfully and breezily.”

“The onslaught is deliciously relentless, like being beaten over the head with a marshmallow pillow, and taking a bite with each blow,” writes HitFix’s Guy Lodge, while Tim Grierson of Deadspin thinks “This sequel has all kinds of jokes: silly ones, dopey ones, groan-inducing ones. And I laughed at just about all of them.”

Here's the trailer for Muppets Most Wanted

These reviews add up to the tune of 71% on Rotten Tomatoes, which isn’t a disastrous score by any means. It’s certainly more than we thought it would land on when we took a look at the first set of reviews. Turns out, any iteration of The Muppets on screen is basically a hit. "Everybody knows that the sequel's never quite as good," sing our fluffy friends during the opening number of the film, and while they’re right, “everyone loves the muppets” would be a similarly accurate tune to trill.

MORE: Pictures from the Los Angeles premiere of "Muppets Most Wanted"