  Ryan Phillippe (left), Will Forte and Kristen Wiig in MacGruber, opening Friday. |
Like the mechanics of a bumblebee in flight, it makes no sense for MacGruber to be funny.
It’s one of the shortest recurring sketches in Saturday Night Live history, with a single joke that gets a slight rewrite each time. He’s a MacGyver who gets distracted by trivialities while disarming timebombs. The punchline: He blows everybody up. Every time.
The closest comparison is Toonces the Driving Cat, and no one made it into a feature film.
Yet, freed from network constraints, star/writer Will Forte and SNL director Jorma Taccone have taken an empty template and headed insanely South with it. This is a film where someone distracts the bad guys by running around naked with a stalk of celery up his rectum (naturally, it’s eaten later).
We’re talking total commitment to an outrageously stupid sight gag. We’re talking a villain named Dieter von Cunth (Val Kilmer), and every horrible bit of sophomoric wordplay that suggests. (“Time to go pound some Cunth!”)
If you’re waiting for me to disapprove, well, OK Mom. But I also laughed, out of shock and surprise, I guess. And if a comedy, no matter how dumb, makes me laugh, I’m not going to deny I did it.
Lower your expectations. Now keep lowering them. Think where the Naked Gun movies dredged. Now think lower. You’re now ready to appreciate the free-wheeling idiocy that Forte and company bring to a project that embodies the question, “Why?”
Indeed, I can’t think of an SNL project that elicited more reflexive hostility, sight unseen, than this one.
And maybe that’s its saving grace. It’s hard to imagine MacGruber being as bad as people expected it to be. And that seems to have been strangely liberating to all involved to be surreally stupid.
Less a specific spoof of MacGyver (indeed, we’re almost halfway through the film before MacGruber does one of his MacGyver-esque “give me a paper clip, a rubber band and a battery” type jury-rigging), MacGruber sets out as a general spoof of ’80s pop culture, starting with Rambo and The A-Team. The heroine, played by Kristen Wiig (who can make me laugh doing nothing) is named Vicki St. Elmo (a nod to St. Elmo’s Fire).
They “make love” to the tune of Mr. Mister’s Broken Wings (which breaks off so you can hear the ungodly grunting of MacGruber’s real rutting). And of course, there’s that mullet, the Samson-like source of MacGruber’s mad skills.
The movie opens with a terrorist raid on a platoon somewhere in the wilds of Russia, and the hijacking of a nuclear missile. It continues in a South American refuge where Col. James Faith (Powers Boothe) and his gung-ho young aide Lt. Dixon Piper (Phillippe) try to convince a retired secret weapon named MacGruber to come out of retirement.
He refuses, until he hears it’s a chance to take revenge on the Cunth that killed his wife (Maya Rudolph) at their wedding.
MacGruber turns out to be fatally incompetent, arrogant, stupid and subliminally gay. OK, let’s get this party started.
The only problem with MacGruber is that laughs based on shock value don’t last, and by the ninth Cunth-joke there are gaps in the funny that get longer in the last half-hour.
(This film is rated 18A)
jim.slotek@sunmedia.ca
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