Reviewed
by Lamar Kukuk
5/30/10
Hard
to think of many hits that spawned more flops than the 1992 comedy classic
Wayne's World. By expanding a popular Saturday Night Live
sketch into a delightfully crazy feature-length story, World convinced
SNL producer Loren Michaels and its studio Paramount that there
was gold in the show's many bizarre recurring characters. Alas, there
wasn't, and trying to turn weird comic creations, many of them built around
simply saying the same catchphrases over and over, into movie stars generated
one It's Pat after another, until the SNL franchise seemed
to shutter its door permanently after the failure of 2000's The Ladies
Man. But now, a decade later, a new recurring sketch has emerged
that actually does seem to lend itself to a three-act plot. MacGruber,
played by Will Forte, is a spoof of iconic 80's action hero MacGyver whose
attempts to defuse bombs with chewing gum and duct tape always fail, mostly
because he's the exact opposite of his inspiration: petty, greedy,
selfish and above all else pretty darn stupid. In giving the character
his own movie, SNL contributors Forte, John Solomon and Jorma Taccone
(who directed), have fashioned a broad, silly spoof of 80's action cliches.
Alas, Forte's not necessarily ready for his big-screen close-up, but by
surrounding him with some top-shelf straight men dumbfounded by his idiocy,
MacGruber is still amusing enough to earn its keep.
A convoy
traveling across the Russian desert is attacked by Dieter Von Cunth (Val
Kilmer), who seizes a powerful nuclear missile. This inspires Col.
James Faith (Powers Booth) to track down the greatest American Hero of
them all, MacGruber (Will Forte), who's gone into seclusion as a Monk since
the death of his wife Casey (Maya Rudolph), murdered by Cunth. MacGruber
rejects the suggestion that he partner with Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe),
instead assembling his own Dream Team of heroes (played by professional
wrestlers). But once he accidentally gets them all killed, Mac needs
help. He persuades Piper and old friend Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig)
to sign on and the three of them take off in pursuit of Cunth. With
that warhead pointed at Washington, DC, they'll need all of Piper's considerable
skill, as well as MacGruber's... well, the guy does have a unique way with
a celery stick.
It's
been well over a decade since I was a regular SNL viewer, but I
do try to catch the MacGruber sketches on YouTube. They come in threes:
Mac, Vicki and a guest star are locked in a room with a bomb, he's ready
to defuse it, then gets distracted by something and blows up. And
each time, the distraction becomes more depraved or ridiculous, spotlighting
the fact that our hero wouldn't exactly pass muster at the Phoenix Foundation.
Pretty much every time, the third sketch is my least favorite because the
MacGruber brain trust doesn't know when to say when and doesn't
know the difference between hilariously transgressive and just plain old
perverse. So it is here as well, where the most obvious jokes play
the best and the filmmakers really, really overestimate the comic potential
of Forte's ass. Playing a character as a sexual deviant can be a
hoot (see “Neil Patrick Harris” in the Harold & Kumar series),
but it doesn't work here because the movie wants to have its cake and eat
it too, playing MacGruber as both utterly perverse and totally unskilled.
At one point we get back-to-back “bad sex scenes” where we're supposed
to laugh uproariously at Mac's total lack of prowess in the bedroom (or
the graveyard, but it all works out the same), and they're both tortuously
unfunny. While it does know how to use profanity for laughs and that
bit with the celery stick is a hoot, for the most part MacGruber
is at its best when it sticks to the action spoof basics.
For
all it's Forte's show, it's really Phillippe who makes the movie work.
In recent years he's perfected his blue collar decency in movies like Flags
of Our Fathers, and he's an utterly perfect choice as a man who could
probably bring down Cunth's criminal empire all by himself, but instead
is forced to drag an imbecile along behind him. Mastering double-takes
and a hundred variations on “what the HELL are you doing?!?”, Phillippe
proves to be a brilliant straight man. Wiig goes the opposite way
and has some really funny moments because of Vicki's conviction that MacGruber
must know what he's doing, but she'd really, really rather not be part
of his plans. Plus, she effortlessly summons the look and feel of
a TV love interest circa 1985. Kilmer lives it up as the unfortunately
named Cunth (seriously, guys, that's all you got?), who also has an absolute
conviction that MacGruber is a threat even when there's no apparent evidence
to back him up. Of course, a hilarious flashback (dig Val's Real
Genius hair!) and MacGruber's touching fireside recounting about their
shared backstory suggests that maybe we're rooting for the wrong guy, nuke
or no...
At
its best, MacGruber is very funny, and the schematic plot gives
the writers much more clothesline to hang the jokes on than the average
flick based on a sketch comedy character. But at its worst, it has
a way of just laying there while Forte goes on and on milking some ill-conceived
gag like... a bad SNL skit. Fans of the source material and
the kind of 80's action heroism it's spoofing (the movie's MacGruber is
really equal parts MacGyver and Rambo) should get enough laughs to carry
the day. It's no Wayne's World, but that particular bolt of
cinematic lightning is unlikely to strike again anytime soon, and it wouldn't
kill the movies to wait another decade before checking back in with the
Not Ready For Prime-Time Players. |
