MacGruber (Jorma Taccone, 2010) – Saturday Night Live has for the most part been off people’s radar for years now, with brief moments of cultural relevance like during the 2008 election or when 300,000 people signed up on a Facebook page to get Betty White on as guest host (although this speaks more to the popularity of Facebook than SNL). Most films based on SNL sketches, such as Coneheads, The Ladies Man, A Night at the Roxbury, and Superstar, have lowly reputations (and, actually, I’ve never seen any of the above). Wayne’s World is widely regarded as the high watermark for SNL-derived features. For not being terrible and actually making sense as a feature length parody of 80’s action movie conventions, MacGruber deserves credit for overcoming the odds and its own origins (the original sketches weren’t even full sketches, and sometimes were as short as 30 seconds long). That being said, the film isn’t perfect.
This is usually where I would write a plot summary, but if you’ve ever seen an 80’s action film, then you know the plot. There’s an arch nemesis (Val Kilmer) with a nuclear weapon and only one man can stop him: he wears a khaki vest and is known only as “MacGruber.” And, if you’ve never seen an 80’s action film, god bless you, but you won’t get this movie anyway.
I want to say at the outset that I laughed a lot during MacGruber. Will Forte is a funny man and I look forward to following his work in the future. However, the film never really figures out what it is, or what it should be. Is it a parody of MacGyver? Some jokes are spot on in lampooning the ridiculousness of a guy who enters firefights without a gun, using whatever is lying around to jerry-rig contraptions while bullets whiz by. But for much of the time, MacGruber is a parody of 80’s stars like Arnold Schwarzenegger or Sylvester Stallone. Those are two wildly different targets for parody (the former being somewhat effeminate and anti-gun, the latter being hyper masculine and pro-gun). To seamlessly switch between the two generates confusion that dulls the comedy.
For example, when we are introduced to MacGruber we learn he is a martial arts expert. Later in the film, however, we are supposed to laugh at his weakness as he gets thrown out of a party by four bouncers. But by the end, he is a martial arts expert again. At the beginning his astounding list of accomplishments are listed (he’s won 16 purple hearts), but after a fatal (and hilarious) mistake, he breaks down and confesses he doesn’t know what he’s doing. So which is it? Is he an imbecile who gets the credit when things happen to go well despite his idiocy? If so, then follow through on the idea. (Think the original Pink Panther movies). Is the joke that the American government is so incompetent they can’t tell how much of a liability MacGruber actually is? That would be something that could be developed. And yet, MacGruber has no such intentions. Colonel James Faith (Powers Boothe), MacGruber’s man in the government and his closest ally, eventually comes to recognize MacGruber as a liability. This is the central problem of the movie… what’s the joke, exactly?
I know what you’re thinking… why am I being so critical of such a ridiculous movie? Well, its because it could have been just as ridiculous but with a more coherent narrative, which would make the jokes hit home harder. Not that there weren’t moments of hilarity. Kristin Wiig plays the hapless sidekick/guinea pig role perfectly, and the sex scenes, sending up the 80’s action-movie cliche, were hilarious. But even here, at it’s funniest, MacGruber has a bad habit of repeating jokes, with a lessened effect each time.
At one point near the beginning of the final act, Ryan Phillipe’s character puts MacGruber in his place, chastising him for being all talk and no action, a criticism that is far too on-the-nose for this kind of movie. That’s the joke of the original skits, and hearing Phillipe say it out loud makes any subsequent braggadocio on the part of MacGruber less funny. Phillipe’s character can clearly see straight through the MacGruber b.s., and spoils the comedic tension that made their relationship funny. It didn’t make sense that he would continue to take direction from or look up to MacGruber, and yet he does.
MacGruber is funniest when Forte portrays MacGruber as a complete idiot (a great tagline for the film is “the ultimate tool”), and loses steam when he actually has to get down to saving the day, something he does in shockingly efficient and violent fashion. MacGruber actually rips the bad guys’ throats out. This is not a satisfying turn for the character nor is it funny. It’s just grotesque, which is fine, but the scattershot nature of the comedy prevents the movie from being a true classic. It feels like they didn’t spend enough time or effort on honing the character or its raison d’etre.