CRITIC ESSAY
MACGRUBER 2010
48%
Directed by Jorma Taccone
Written by Will Forte, John Solomon, Jorma Taccone
Starring Will Forte, Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, Powers Boothe, Maya Rudolph
Saturday Night Live may be a prestigious, awards- and accolades-strewn cultural institution, yet it has often served as a critical and popular punching bag. No aspect of the show has endured as much derision as its once-prolific and now seemingly shuttered film division. True, without Saturday Night Live’s forays into cinema, there would be no Blues Brothers or Wayne’s World movie adaptations, but Lorne Michaels’s venerable comedy machine’s movie wing is more often associated with the opportunistic, bottom-feeding likes of It’s Pat: The Movie and Night at the Roxbury. When someone says something looks like it could be a Saturday Night Live movie, they rarely mean it in a positive way.
So it is not surprising that when the Saturday Night Live movie machine returned in 2010 with a feature-film adaptation of a series of micro-sketches parodying MacGyver, a TV show whose run ended in 1992, the critical response was less than ecstatic. A.O. Scott of the New York Times sneered that MacGruber was “a film that poses a philosophical question fundamental to our inquiry here, namely: ‘Why does this exist?’” Andrew Pulver of the Guardian jeered, “Only the merest hint of amusement is to be found in this uninspired latest effusion from the conveyor belt that is Saturday Night Live.”
Great satire often has the misfortune to be dismissed and mistaken for what it’s satirizing.
And so, from a critical—if not a creative—standpoint, MacGruber might have suffered from looking and feeling exactly like the explosions-filled, testosterone-poisoned Jerry Bruckheimer blockbusters that were just as much the targets of its parody as the Richard Dean Anderson television program about the Rube Goldberg of crime-fighting.
Director Jorma Taccone surrounds his co-screenwriter and star Will Forte—who is ultraconvincing as the world’s biggest, least likable douchebag—with fellow Saturday Night Live ringers Kristen Wiig and Maya Rudolph, who play women unfortunate enough to discover that the film’s demented anti-hero is as terrible and selfish at making love as he is at doing everything else. Otherwise, though, Taccone’s commitment to verisimilitude sees him stocking the film with the kind of stone-faced serious actors you would find in the non-satirical version of this story.
The great Powers Boothe brings craggy tough-guy authority to the key role of the stoic-but-trusting mentor who has absolute faith in our anti-hero (despite him being a lethal threat to anyone cursed to be in his orbit). Ryan Phillippe, meanwhile, makes for a terrific, understated straight man as MacGruber’s second-in-command, a qualified super-soldier who quickly discovers that the throat-ripping titular maniac views the agents around him as, alternately, cannon fodder, human targets, and sexual objects. Val Kilmer is a smirking delight as the movie’s villain.
Taccone mastered the art of parody and pastiche in multiple forms and mediums as one-third of Berkeley-founded comedy troupe Lonely Island. (The group, which also includes Andy Samberg and Akiva Schaffer, gave us the hit comedy song “I’m on a Boat,” among others.) He brings that gift to MacGruber, a film that shares Lonely Island’s genius for delivering sublimely scatological silliness in a deceptively smart, subversive way. So along with all of the lowbrow, screamingly vulgar, and laugh-out-loud funny gags involving ghost sex and celery being stuck in unconventional places, there is a scathingly satirical takedown of action cinema’s deification of alpha males and cult of unexamined machismo.
MacGruber boasts a hero who is probably, when it comes down to it, worse than most villains as it relates to cowardice, pettiness, and needless deaths caused through carelessness and stupidity. Throughout the film, we get subversive little glimpses into MacGruber’s fractured psyche that suggest he’s not just unhealthily cocky in conventional action-hero terms but also deeply unhinged, and not in a benign, casualty-free fashion, either.
Still, MacGruber is blessed throughout with a joyful sense of play. The film is child-like in the best sense, even as its titular emotionally stunted man-child embodies the worst aspects of childhood with his inability to look beyond his own selfish immediate urges and needs. It’s poetically apt that a movie about a guy who can theoretically make useful contraptions out of random detritus is defined by a deceptive, impressive level of comic invention.
As A.O. Scott suggested in his pan, MacGruber may not have much of a reason to exist. That only makes its existence even more of a sublime, improbably sustained cosmic joke. MacGruber probably never should have even made it to air on Saturday Night Live given the perverse untimeliness of its satirical subject, but thank God that ridiculous series of sketches did make it to prime time and that it led to an even more transcendently ridiculous film adaptation.
Critics and moviegoers (who overwhelmingly stayed home rather than pay good money for what looked like a one-joke movie from an entertainment institution not exactly known for quality control or consistency) might have deemed MacGruber Rotten upon its release, but to its ever-growing army of cultists, it gets Fresher and more hilarious every year.
Rotten Tomatoes’ Critics Consensus It too often mistakes shock value for real humor, but MacGruber is better than many SNL films—and better than it probably should be.