Making Laughs Out of String and Gum
Video store discount bins are littered with the unopened boxes of failed movies based on old “Saturday Night Live” skits. From “The Ladies Man” and “Superstar” to “A Night at the Roxbury” and “Stuart Saves His Family” to — yikes! — “It’s Pat,” a lot of pain and suffering has been caused by the “SNL” folks trying to capitalize on their momentarily popular skits.
But now, one of the most unlikely premises for an “SNL” movie has been turned into one of their most unlikely successes. “MacGruber” is a full-length comedy based on a recurring 30-second one-joke parody of a television show from the 1980s I never saw. And yet the movie, surprisingly, is funny.
The film may be weak at times (and by “at times,” I mean the entire first hour). But even when the premise is slim, the jokes are still amusing.
Silly, but amusing.
Will Forte, who lacks the charismatic strength to carry an entire movie, stars as MacGruber, a former Army special ops fighter, the best of the best. Known for manufacturing deadly weapons out of found objects, like Richard Dean Anderson on the TV show “MacGyver,” he has retired to an Ecuadorian monastery. But after a very bad man with a very naughty name (Val Kilmer) steals a nuclear warhead, a colonel (Powers Booth) turns to the retired soldier to save the world.
“Your country needs you. You’re our only hope,” the colonel says, earnestly. When MacGruber earnestly states that he is out of the game, the colonel earnestly responds, “The game has changed.” To which MacGruber earnestly answers, “But the players are the same.”
And this is one source of the film’s success: It isn’t just parodying a single television show from the ’80s, it is parodying several genres of movies from that time (which explains the hilarious 1980s love scene, among others). The clothes, hair and music of that era come under fire, too; MacGruber’s colleague and potential love interest even has the uber-’80s name Vicki St. Elmo.
Vicki is played by Kristen Wiig, a one-note actress for a one-note character, but she provides plenty of smiles as the much-put-upon foil for MacGruber’s inevitably moronic ideas. Though they tend to put her in danger, she is besotted enough to go along with them, if reluctantly. Only Ryan Phillippe, as an actual soldier, has any sense about their mission.
As you might expect, given the state of “SNL” and comedy in general these days, the jokes are almost universally juvenile. With its gags about celery sticks and its apparent fascination with Forte’s naked butt, this film may very well appeal more to men than women. But that is men, and not boys, because the picture has a no-fooling-around R rating.
The gore and language add nothing to the comedy, while the sex and nudity add just a little. The filmmakers could have made it without any of the offensive material, and it would have been in better taste.
But that, of course, would be beside the point.
-- Dan Neman, former movie critic for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, reviews movies every week here at www.TheBoomerMagazine.com. He also writes the “Silver Screen with Dan Neman” column in each issue of Boomer magazine.
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