A hit-and-miss action spoof (the misses often landing harder than the hits), MacGruber is reasonably successful largely due to the exertion of star Will Forte. Doing anything for a laugh—the character MacGruber’s standard numbers are getting naked in public areas, grunting scarily during sex, carrying celery in his ass and hallucinating that he’s copulating with his wife’s ghost—every time the movie embarrasses itself, Forte finds a way to redeem it. Not as knowing as SNL subgroup The Lonely Island’s other feature Hot Rod, nor as sharp an action hero send-up as Tropic Thunder, MacGruber plays more as an update on the Austin Powers formula. Rather than a 1960s movie artifact, multiple-combat-medal-winner MacGruber is a fossil of masculinity prominent in MacGyver and the Simpson/Bruckheimer action films that ruled the ’80s. Transposed to the present, he’s an egomaniacal cretin. Director Jorma Taccone relies too heavily on ironic power ballad montages, but the subject’s out-of-place machismo is a timely joke.
This article appears in May 20-26, 2010.
Jorma Taccone (of Lonely Island fame) needs to stick to spoofing euro-trash dance music. He and his compatriots seems better suited to creating 5 minute sketches rather than a full-length film.
SNL movies (save for The Blues Brothers, which functions solely because of John Landis’ involvement, along with a litany of R&B legends) all seem to want to expand on what are essentially one-dimensional main characters. MacGruber functions as a sketch because it doesn’t wear out it’s welcome, it drops in, he gets distracted, the bomb blows up. People laugh. Expand this to an hour and a half, and it fails. You keep waiting for it to end, but it just doesn’t.
At least it’s better than “Night At The Roxbury”, but then again, that’s not saying much.