MacGruber is the latest film that started out as a skit on
Saturday Night Live. Never having seen the skits, I can’t really say how much
better or worse the movie is compared to them. But I can say that they’re a great spoof
on the ridiculously silly 1980s action series MacGuyver, starring Richard Dean
Anderson, before he signed up for Stargate Command. MacGuyver took a goofy
concept--an action hero who jerry-rigs booby traps out of
assorted items he’d find lying round--and ran with it.
MacGruber was a big bomb of the summer of 2010, and I’m not sure why. While it’s
not an outstanding movie, it’s also far from being terrible. It makes great fun
of the corny clichés contained within the standard action movie genre, as well
as 1980s TV shows, such as the one it’s directly lampooning. Val Kilmer lends
gravitas to his part as a villainous mastermind with a bad haircut who steals a
nuclear warhead from the Russians. Once word about this gets out, MacGruber is
sought out, and he has an equally bad haircut: a holdover mullet from the 80s.
In fact, just about everything about this guy screams the 1980s, from his choice
of sappy soft rock music, to the Madza Miata that he drives.
Will Forte is funny as the dim-witted MacGruber, who also has the same idiotic
talent of making a weapon out of everyday items that he finds laying around--but
the movie marvelously sends up this skill by having McGruber out-gunned in nearly
every fight, showing just how useless it is. Ryan Philippe is also very good as
a young buck soldier who hopes to learn from the master--only to realize that
MacGruber is nowhere near as good as his reputation makes him out to be. Kristen
Wiig is very good as the wannabe girlfriend who has an extremely funny moment
in a coffee shop.
The only drawback to the film is that it’s extremely crude, with the unrated
version even more so. The language is salty enough to make a sailor blush, but I
actually didn’t mind that, because MacGruber’s potty mouth was used to very good
effect as a source for comedy (the movie makes him out to be something of a
boarder-line psychopath who’d probably be a serial killer if he wasn’t busy
fighting bad guys). But the constant jokes and visual references to various body
parts fell way over the line of being too much information for me. Still, this
should be an enjoyable romp for adults who’re armed with the fast forward control
(to avoid the more cruder stuff), as well as action movie fans with a healthy
sense of humor.
--SF
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