Forte uses easy targets to defuse potential bomb

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 21/05/2010 (5968 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

PROBABLY no single television show has ever generated as many movies as Saturday Night Live.

Notice I didn’t say good movies.

Oh, decent ones may occur. But for every single Blues Brothers or Wayne’s World, there’s many more belonging to the devolved sub-genus of It’s Pat, A Night at the Roxbury, and The Ladies Man.

Placed somewhere in the middle of the pack, MacGruber may be the most unlikely spinoff of all. The MacGruber sketches, a parody of the ’90s TV series MacGyver, barely last a minute a pop and they’re basically the same gag. MacGruber (played by Will Forte in an obligatory mullet cut and down vest) has 30 seconds to defuse a time bomb, a task he attempts to accomplish with whatever bottle cap, chewing gum and tin foil is at hand. Then he gets distracted.

Defusing the potential box-office bomb that is MacGruber requires a little more finesse, and a lot more in the way of comic inspiration.

When a nuclear weapon is stolen by ruthless megalomaniac Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), MacGruber is recruited from his exile in South America to neutralize the situation, a task he eventually takes on with the help of meek, would-be lounge singer Vicki St. Elmo (the dependably droll Kristen Wiig) and the soon-to-be-disillusioned MacGruber fanboy Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe).

Forgoing the defuse-a-bomb gags (well, except for the climax) Forte uses the premise to launch a larger assault on ’80s culture. Specifically, screenwriters Forte, John Solomon and director Jorma Taccone mock the Commando era’s action movie clichés (including the building-a-band-of-mercenaries sequence… watch for Winnipeg’s own Chris Jericho here), the R-rated movie love scene, ’80s-style (pan right from the lamp to the bed and… bingo), the power ballads that accompanied those aforementioned love scenes and the Blaupunkt car stereo that played them.

As for MacGruber himself, Forte wisely takes a page from the Will Ferrell comedy playbook by infusing the character with wholly unwarranted confidence and hair-trigger emotional volatility.

Also like Ferrell, the man will do anything for a laugh. (One word: celery.)

Given the movie has such easy satiric targets, one can’t laud the film’s comic invention. It’s kind of like shooting fish in a barrel, really, even if the shooting is done with a rubber band, a pencil stub and a paper clip.

That it works even occasionally is rather amazing.

randall.king@freepress.mb.ca

Other Voices

 

Selected excerpts from reviews of MacGruber.

 

A jerry-rigged contraption whose rubber-bands-and-baking-soda construction is lucky to work once and then fall apart.

— John DeFore, Hollywood Reporter

 

One of not only the best spinoffs, but the best all-around comedies in recent memory.

— Todd Gilchrist, Hollywood News

 

I could not believe the stuff I was seeing in this movie… You just won’t believe where it goes, and that’s comedy… I laughed my *** off at MacGruber.

— Fred Topel, Can magazine

 

An unending string of easy scatological jokes which it executes really, really well.

— Joshua Tyler, Cinemablend.com

 

When the film is funny, it’s very funny.

— Chris Tilly, IGN News UK

 

Add in some slapstick and the infinite depths of MacGruber’s incompetence and you have a smartly funny movie that uses all of Hollywood’s lavish resources and conventions to get you to laugh at Hollywood’s excesses and conventions.

— Ed Gonzalez, Slant magazine

 

Compiled by Shane Minkin

 

 

 

MacGruber

n Starring Will Forte, Kristen Wiig and Val Kilmer

n Grant Park, Polo Park, St. Vital, Towne.

n 14A

2 1/2 out of 5 stars