FILM REVIEW: MacGruber

Posted by: Tony – May 21, 2010

It may just be time for the Saturday Night Live producers to face facts. They cannot turn a 90 second skit into a 90 minute movie. A short skit on television allows the viewer to mildly chuckle at the stupidity and promptly forget it. A feature length movie provides far too much time for a person to grow tired of the repetitive antics and desperately wish they were watching something else. It would be unfair to say that SNL has never succeeded in turning a skit into a good movie. Notable exceptions, such as The Blues Brothers and Wayne’s World, immediately come to mind. For every one that succeeds, though, countless others fall short. MacGruber becomes the latest in a long line of failed attempts at an SNL movie.

The film focuses on the titular character, played by Will Forte who also cowrote the film. He is a wildly famous American operative who has been called out of retirement for one last mission. His arch-nemesis, Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), has stolen a nuclear missile, and only MacGruber can prevent him from using it to bring down the American government. To ensure the mission is a success, MacGruber forms a team including Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig), another retired operative he worked with in his glory days, and Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe), a young officer who works by the book and tries to keep MacGruber’s eccentric methods from getting them all killed. The mission: MacGruber has only 90 minutes to win the girl, earn the respect of the smart young officer, stop the bad guy, and poke fun at as many 80s action movie cliches as possible.

It was interesting noting the audience reaction to the cast of the film. The mere presence of Val Kilmer elicited a big laugh at the beginning of the movie. What in the world is he doing in a movie like this? Unfortunately, over the last few years, he has appeared in almost exclusively in B-movies. Movies made for television, and straight to video became his home, so the villain in a parody action movie does not indicate too far a fall. Ryan Phillippe, on the other hand, seems very out of place. Typically starring in high quality dramas, he finds himself playing the straight man to MacGruber’s clown. Perhaps the producers were hoping he would add an air of credibility (or perhaps marketability) to film, but by the end it does not seem like he needs to try too hard to act bemused with MacGruber’s antics.

The comedy in MacGruber ranges from mildly funny, to painfully stupid, to outright disgusting. This is about par for the course for most comedies these days, but you will find that stupid and disgusting appear much more frequently than funny. The writers also made one could be the biggest mistake in a movie like this one. The main character, who is always on screen, is so impossible to like that there is no way to enjoy watching this film. In 2008, we had Get Smart, a movie similar in premise and characters to this one. In that film, Steve Carell played the overconfident, bumbling secret agent. He was very genuine, though. He had the best intentions at heart, he just was not very smart. That is not MacGruber. MacGruber is an unapologetic asshole from start to finish, and who really wants to watch someone like that for an hour and a half?

When all is said and done, it becomes clear that MacGruber should never have been made into a movie. It is clear that the film was just a collection of a dozen or so ideas for Saturday Night Live sketches. They might have been more enjoyable in that capacity. Perhaps this movie will serve as MacGruber’s last hurrah, and there will not be any more sktches on SNL. If that is the case, perhaps it is better to just get the entire 90 minutes over at once, than have to suffer through a minute a week for years to come.

By Gareth Mussen