LYT Review: MACGRUBER

MACGRUBER is touted as being the best Saturday Night Live movie since WAYNE’S WORLD. But what does that mean, exactly?

CONEHEADS was decent. WAYNE’S WORLD 2 had Christopher Walken. But what else is there of merit? STUART SAVES HIS FAMILY wasn’t terrible, but that’s as kind as I get. IT’S PAT was so bad it never even got theatrically released. It’s true that I didn’t see A NIGHT AT THE ROXBURY or SUPERSTAR, and must therefore allow for the fact that they could be great masterpieces of cinema for all I know...but I did see THE LADIES MAN, and folks, a dogshit milkshake is better than that one.

If you stretch the concept of what an SNL movie is, and classify HOT ROD as one – it’s produced by Lorne Michaels and made by the SNL Digital Shorts team also known as The Lonely Island – then all else falls apart, because HOT ROD is, in my book, a masterpiece of comedy. And whatever your opinion of it, you should know that there is definitely some sensibility-sharing with the MACGRUBER movie, which is no coincidence, as The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone is the director.

 

Originally a one-note parody of the ‘80s TV show MacGyver, MacGruber (Will Forte) as a sketch character was also a virtual update of the ‘80s SNL sketch “Toonces, the Driving Cat.” Every skit is more or less the same: a character with an alleged talent invariably screws up and kills everyone, only to return again some subsequent week and do more or less the same thing. Various MacGruber sketches have also depicted him with a gay son (Shia LaBeouf) and as the actual son of MacGyver (played once again by original star Richard Dean Anderson). The movie ignores any such “canon,” as it were, carrying over only Kristen Wiig as sidekick Vicki St. Elmo (though to appreciate the movie’s funniest line, a passing knowledge of the sketch is helpful). A rather serious, bloody beginning fails to quite set the tone for what’s to come, giving us a puffy-faced Val Kilmer in Siberia, shooting a guy in the head. No jokes yet – only later will we learn that Kilmer’s character is named Dieter Von Cunth, and hear MacGruber constantly vow to “pound Cunth.” An overdramatic, slowed-down rendition of the MacGruber theme is the first hint of the film’s humor, as it features a gratuitous ‘80s saxophone solo, and ends with the line: “MacGruber...He made a f***ing movie...MacGruber!”

Yes, the f-bomb gets dropped a lot in MACGRUBER, which may come as a shock to those expecting TV standards and practices. There are also many dirty jokes, including a recurring bit about inserting a celery stalk into one’s posterior. I look forward to a Christian site like Movieguide detailing the exact number and nature of homosexual inferences.

I’m also a tad amused that several WWE superstars make cameos, given the PG-mandate their public personas are generally constrained by. One of the aforementioned homosexual inferences even involves a certain wrestler, but it’d be spoiling to say which.

Not to say that hetero sex gets left out – there are a couple of sequences that, while arguably closer to real-life intercourse than the standard movie-staged version, are also direct “tributes” of sort to the hilariously overdone Tommy Wiseau love scenes in THE ROOM. I mean...the candles...the music...the sexy dress...we know what’s goin’ on here. And Taccone and Forte have admitted it, much to what I imagine will be Tommy’s delight.

Much like HOT ROD, the story trades on ‘80s movie clichés – not to mention music, as Mac favors the worst of the decade, like Michael Bolton and Toto -- with MacGruber in Rambo-style retirement at a monastery in South America. Brought back into action by the Trautman-like Col. Faith (Powers Boothe), after remembering that it was Von Cunth who killed his bride-to-be years ago, MacGruber assembles a team of experts (the aforementioned WWE superstars), only that doesn’t work out too well. Forced, then, to assemble a second team, Mac enlists by-the-book military rookie Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe), and his late wife’s best friend Vicki (Wiig). Hilariously and ineptly going through various tropes (card game with the villain, infiltrating a party, intercepting a secret trade, villainous attack on the hero’s house, etc.) MacGruber manages to screw almost everything up, and obsess on the dumbest things, and yet, if he can confess his love for Vicki, and manage to work with Piper (Phillippe has never been better than as exasperated straight man to Forte), he just might get to cut of Von Cunth’s penis and feed it to him – an oft-stated goal.

Arguably the best ‘80s nod: a brief flashback to the characters’ college years, in which Val Kilmer sports his REAL GENIUS hairdo. That moment is also notable because it’s one of many that reveal just how unsympathetic a character MacGruber really is; time and again, he treats people horribly, and if you can’t get behind that, the movie may not be for you. Even when is heart is sort-of revealed to be in the right place, he’ll do something else ridiculously mean-spirited...Forte has the puppy-dog face to pull this off better than most, but if you need your good guys likable, this might not work.

The typical lower-budget production values of an SNL movie are in effect, but perhaps that price tag allowed them to get away with making the movie as filthily hilarious as it is. We’ve seen movies not unlike this before: HOT SHOTS PART DEUX and TEAM:AMERICA: WORLD POLICE have similar DNA in their funny bones. A fellow moviegoer described it as “funny, but not good”...I can see the point, but if a movie makes me laugh hard, and particularly if it does so on purpose, I call that good enough.

(Full disclosure: my friend Chris Heinrich was a cameraman on the movie. But he doesn’t care what I say about it.)

 

Luke Y. Thompson is an actor, writer, and film critic living in Hollywood.