MacGruber, if you didn’t already know, is a Saturday Night Live sketch that parodies a little show called MacGyver, which ran from 1985-1992. It was beloved by Americans and Bouvier sisters alike. MacGyver never used guns, but rather he would fashion some sort of weapon out of every day items. This premise begat several phrases, such as “MacGyver it.” The SNL sketch usually lasts 30-90 seconds, and involves MacGruber and his partner Vicki St. Elmo trapped in a room trying to defuse a bomb. Hilarity ensues and the sketch ends with an explosion, as MacGruber is unsuccessful at his task. This is the latest addition to the sketch-turned-movie universe, which is quite a mixed bag of good and bad.
The premise of the movie is fairly basic. Dieter Von Cunth steals a nuclear warhead and wants to destroy Washington D.C. Cunth killed MacGruber’s wife, so the task of stopping him becomes personal.
I liked MacGruber a lot, for many reasons. One, is that the movie just outright hilarious. There were several scenes (pretty much the entire coffee shop scene, and the last graveyard scene) in which I could not stop laughing. And a lot of the comedy is clever. A lot of it is funny just because vulgarity is uttered with excellent timing and vocal inflections as well, so you get both the “intelligent” and “blue” humor. There are some lines that fall flat, but the film is more funny than not. Some of my favorite lines: “I am going to rip your dick off and shove it in your mouth. And that is non-negotiable.” “Dead at the age of who-the-fuck-cares.”
Another reason that I liked this movie is because it adhered well to the fact that it is a parody of something that exists, rather than thinking itself an original character in a movie that just happened to be on SNL. This was really the only concern I had prior to watching the film; that instead of continuing to parody a show, they would try to give us a story about MacGruber as a real person. The film makers did nothing of the sort. Because of this, all the overused and formulaic action movie conventions that were employed actually contributed to the film rather than taking away from it. There was some SNLness in it, because it is a sketch after all, but it was well balanced. This made the sketch translate very well to a film. You even still get the goods that that make the sketch funny, inserted right where it is supposed to be, and thus very honorable to the sketch. I imagine that if there were a MacGyver movie (and there may be, but I will never know, because I will never see the fucker) it would be done this way (obviously sans the swearing and silliness). All that being said, there are no Oscar worthy performances, no deep character connections felt, but that was precisely the point.
Will Forte and Kristen Wiig are both hilarious as MacGruber and Vicki St. Elmo. Val Kilmer and Ryan Phillippe are fine as well, however their roles were not largely comedic.
This is without question one of the better SNL movies, as opposed to crap like Superstar, Stuart Saves His Family and very idea that there is apparently a script based on the Super Fans sketch, which I discuss on the latest podcast with our friends over at 3SMOV Radio. Thank God it was never made, but someone still needs to destroy it, as it is being read at the Just For Laughs Comedy Festival, and some idiot may think it would be great to make it happen. But I digress. MacGruber!
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