May 26, 2010: MacGruber
It’s no accident that I re-watched Tommy Boy (1995) early one evening, and then went out later to the theatre to see MacGruber. Tommy Boy is a comedy from an almost sentimental bygone era even though it’s only 15 years ago, as these days gross-out humour, extreme action violence, and inventive foul language are the things which distinguish many a successful comedy. Hollywood seems to struggle wih the decision between going all the way to extremes with R-rated comedies which will have automatically limited theatrical audiences, and cleaning up the films for the all-important PG-13 rating in order to fill theatres with droves of the teenage boys who are and always have been the bread and butter for the genre.
MacGruber takes the full-on approach with the violence and language, an unabashedly R-rated adaptation of what is actually a fun little series of recurring sketches on Saturday Night Live. In an obvious parody of action movies and TV shows of the 1980s and more directly of the TV show MacGyver (1985-92), MacGruber on SNL always finds himself in some disastrous situation in which he must defuse a bomb in a minute or two, but he turns out to be completely incompetent and the sketch ends up with a long shot of the entire building blowing up. One could be excused for thinking that this doesn’t sound like enough material to expand to a feature film, but SNL players have never let that stop them from trying. As it turns out, MacGruber is a reasonable success as a full-length film, thanks in large part to the wise writing decision to make the character more competent than he is in the short sketches.
There’s plenty to like here, with Will Forte’s likeable portrayal of MacGruber, Ryan Phillippe’s beautifully straight-faced performance, shameless over-the-top sight gags, and fast-paced violent action scenes. The story is as good as can be expected – MacGruber is a former special ops soldier who retired after a ridiculous number of tours of duty, but he needs to step back into the game when his arch-enemy acquires a nuclear warhead, so he assembles his old team to help but then accidentally blows them up, and instead is stuck with his old flame Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe helping him out. By the way, his nemesis, played by Val Kilmer, blew up MacGruber’s wife at their wedding, which seems like a pretty good reason to want to kill him in the way MacGruber repeatedly describes.
Unfortunately, there’s also plenty to keep me from recommending this film to anyone outside a select audience, which explains the horrific opening weekend box office performance of less than $4 million from 2500 screens. The thing is, it almost seems like the movie chose to be bad, to throw away success and brilliance, and I’m having a hard time figuring out why. MacGruber is at its best when it trusts the viewer and throws lots of intertwined action and gags and fast rambling speeches our way, but it keeps pulling back from that approach and losing momentum. More than once I found myself in escalating fits of laughter during the action scenes, and I found myself wondering during the slower parts why it was so uneven. It’s almost like the movie doesn’t want to be boastful about how good it is when it’s good, so things like the hilarious opening song and the actual emotional development of the characters are there, but they are glossed over and missed by the audience. When firing on all cylinders, this film piles on the laughs one after another, but there are too many awkward moments which are simply not funny. MacGruber’s stupidity and inability to draw correct conclusions gets old after a while. Kristen Wiig’s character is underwritten and I think that’s one of the major problems with the movie – she should be a core part of this story, but instead seems tacked-on. The brutal blood-spraying violence is in keeping with the tone of parody of 1980s action movies from the likes of Schwarzenegger and Van Damme, but it sometimes seems inconsistent with the rest of the approach, such as with the “throat rips” which have been comically hinted at throughout the film but then actually happen en masse during the final action sequence. And there’s way too much reliance on cheap homophobic gags, which is quite common for this type of movie, but as usual it casts a pall over otherwise sympathetic characters. Making juvenile fun of sexual orientation seems to be here to stay, but MacGruber goes too far on one occasion with nothing more than clear discrimination for cruel reasons.
I suppose in the spirit of full disclosure I should point out that I never really watched MacGyver back in the 1980s, but I’m familiar with its particular quirks, and I have seen plenty of the action movies which are part and parcel of the parody here. I’d cautiously recommend MacGruber to anyone looking for a funny and raunchy take-off on that genre, but don’t be expecting brilliance in flashes of more than about a minute here and there.
Do some laughs make it worthwhile?
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