A Bomb 'MacGruber' Can't Diffuse

by Brett Parker

It's one thing to make a movie based on a Saturday Night Live skit, it's another to make a movie based on a bad SNL skit. MacGruber is a recently concocted SNL character that is meant to parody the hit 80s TV show, MacGuyver (talk about a joke that's 25 years too late!). Like the show's title character, MacGruber is also a specially-trained secret agent who tries to escape from deadly situations with meticulously-crafted inventions. Unlike MacGuyver, however, MacGruber is a deeply incompetent and disturbed individual who doesn't have the intelligence or confidence to follow through with his plans. This skit doesn't really produce killer laughs, only mild amusement. An entire movie with this character could grow tiring.

When the MacGruber movie got a greenlight from Hollywood, the brains from SNL did, in fact, come up with a clever objective: instead of simply spoofing an 80s television character, why not spoof all the over-the-top, macho man action movies from the late 80s-early 90s? SNL star Will Forte and his cohorts said they would look to films like Rambo, Die Hard, and Lethal Weapon for comic inspiration. It sounded like they were on the right track, but the final product misses the mark in producing consistently big laughs. It only hits its comic targets half the time, settling for misguided, lowbrow gags instead of really taking action cliches to the self-reflexive cleaners. In the end, the film is only slightly more amusing than the very skits it's based on.

The film opens with a nuclear warhead being stolen by a mysterious villain named Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer) who sports a silly pony tail and pitch black clothing. U.S. Colonel James Faith (Powers Boothe) learns of Cunth's actions and realizes that the only agent who can stop him is his sworn nemesis, MacGruber (Will Forte). Cunth tried to kill MacGruber on his wedding day by rigging a bomb at the ceremony. MacGruber survived the explosion but his beloved fiance, Casey (Maya Rudolph), died horribly. In the aftermath of the explosion, MacGruber decided to fake his own death and go into seclusion. Yet once Faith tracks him down to tell him of Cunth's reappearance, MacGruber wants back in action!
Faith explains how MacGruber is a highly decorated agent with several prestigious honors under his belt, yet in action he appears to be one of the most incompetent and lame-brained agents to ever stumble onto the field! He is constantly fumbling with his homemade weapons and brings about more chaos then he tries to prevent. His style and musical tastes also suggest a man stuck in the past: he sports a mullet, rocks flannel shirts with a tan vest, and listens to 80s soft rock constantly. Nonetheless, MacGruber carries a fierce determination to carry out his mission. After a hilarious mishap with his old soldier buddies, he recruits Faith's aide Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) and Casey's sister, Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) to help him defeat Cunth.

In a time of quick-cutting CGI frantic action surrounded by athletic pretty boys, I feel a certain nostalgia for the 80s-90s action films that MacGruber sets out to spoof. The kind of action movies that Joel Silver used to produce constantly. They used to feature grizzled he-men with troubled pasts and a cynical outlook on life. They drank, they womanized, they didn't care. They got caught up battling eccentric villains with outlandish styles and strange accents. They had interludes with women who could be just as tough, vulgar, and unforgiving as they were. There was grotesque and gratuitous violence. Limbs and blood flew around everywhere. There were explosions every other minute. There were shamelessly melodramatic developments with a wonderfully dramatic musical score to accompany it (Michael Kamen was the go-to-guy for such a score back in the day). It was a glorious era, one that I feel was inadvertently unraveled by the self-reflexive overkill of Last Action Hero and the shockingly vile violence of Ricochet. If you crack an affectionate smile whenever you hear the names John McClane, Martin Riggs, or John Cutter, then you know exactly what I'm talking about.

I admire MacGruber for targeting this brand of action films, for its ripe with juicy jokes. The film really comes alive when it highlights the formulas and conventions of these outsized action standards with the same height of frantic energy. MacGruber has a strong awareness of the genres delicious overacting and bloody overkill. It follows the same developments of a throwback action picture with both a wink and a nudge. There's melodramatic flashbacks, declarations of vengeance, bloody fistfights, shameless slow-motion shots. First time feature director Jorma Taccone really has a strong sense of the look and feel of this kind of testosterone atmosphere, he just doesn't push the jokes as far as they can go. The genre's cliches are highlighted, but they are never played with in an exceptionally clever way. They are poked at from the most lowbrow level, and this spares MacGruber from being a significant spoof.

There was a dangerous air of silence in the theater where I watched MacGruber and the film's undoing is from a lack of strong gags. Aside from two uproarious sex scenes scored to Mr. Mister's “Broken Wings,” this film fails to produce any memorable or wildly hilarious gags. It's all to content with being a lame-brained stupid comedy. Stupid comedies can work wonderfully for producing great laughs, for if people hold low expectations for your film, you can get away with bloody murder in your jokes without anyone stopping you. That was the sly genius behind comedies like Dodgeball and Zoolander. In spite of Will Forte's admirable comic energy, MacGruber's childish insanity far outweighs its comic sensibilities and the result is a dud.

Part of the problem is that MacGruber himself is not fleshed out as a cooky character we can care about. The joke is that he's a relic from the 80s completely incapable of handling government missions in the present day. The film barely highlights any decade-different culture shocks, making MacGruber's 80s bravado a lifeless joke. In a time of iPods, smart cars, and Facebook, a man of the Mullet and Walkman trying to function in this era could be very funny. The first Austin Powers, for example, knew how to wonderfully milk fish-out-of-water jokes from the idea of a 60s secret agent transported to the 90s. It's jarring that the writers here could overlook such a comic opportunity.

My opinion on MacGruber's comedy reflects my same opinion on the current generation of Saturday Night Live's writers and players: they present good ideas for comic gags, but they don't mold them into true hilarity. Saturday Night Live used to be a reliable haven for live wire comic talents and uproarious gags, yet the skits nowadays are extremely limp and lame. They have the potential to be killer gags, yet the new age SNL talent are clueless when it comes to making something that really cooks. It'd be nice to believe that these players could improve over time, but the current SNL team have a curiously smug, self-congratulatory air about themselves; they think they really are creating legendary gags. They seem to think that being on SNL automatically makes them comic legends. Back in the day, SNL legends had to work harder and think smarter to etch their names in the public eye. Before guys like John Belushi or Adam Sandler became household names, they had to labor to come up with hot jokes and characters that people would actually give a damn about. Those kind of giant efforts feel lacking in SNL nowadays and those efforts are crucially missing in MacGruber as well.

It's generally acknowledged that movies based on SNL skits make for awful comedies that scrape the bottom of the barrel. As the saying goes, what works for two minutes won't exactly work for two hours. The Blues Brothers and Wayne's World are considered the exceptions, and I must admit I have a strange fondness for Coneheads. MacGruber truly had the tools and mindset to break this cinematic curse, but it fails to do so. It will unfortunately join the weaker SNL movies in comic oblivion. Now I hope that a cool film team will come out and make the MacGuyver movie, showing the YouTube era just how cool this cat really is!