DIE HARD IS EASY. DIE HARD COMEDY IS HARD.
MacGruber
*
Review by Joel Frost
The general structure of a MacGruber skit on Saturday Night Live is this: A bomb is about to go off, and MacGruber must defuse it. His side-kick Vicki is there, handing him various things he needs to do the job, and letting him know just how much time he has left. There’s often another person in the room, usually the show’s host, and the discussion between MacGruber and that person winds up distracting MacGruber from defusing the bomb. So it blows up. That’s the gag. Week after week on SNL, often more than once a show, MacGruber, Vicki, and someone else are apparently blown to smithereens. It’s satisfying in a way, since MacGruber consistently shows himself to be a pompous simpleton with no particular actual talent for defusing explosives. Watching MacGruber get his comeuppance time and again is a central part of what makes the skit funny. It’s satisfying to watch a dummy fail because of his bravado and lack of ability to focus.
The general structure of “MacGruber”, the film is this: MacGruber comes out of retirement in order to settle the score with the man who killed his bride. In the process, he gets to save the world, prance about naked with a piece of celery sticking out of his ass, and also rip people’s throats out with his bare hands. It’s MacGruber like you’ve never seen him before: with an R rating and no pesky TV censors. It’s MacGruber without rules! As nasty as he wants to be! It’s better!
Except that it’s not. It’s dumb, lifeless and most importantly, not funny. In the process of moving a decent SNL skit to the big screen, the same thing that usually happens has happened again. They fucked it up.
How did they fuck it up, you ask? I could say that the beauty of the original skit was utterly ignored. I could postulate that the structure that made MacGruber work on SNL, entirely ignored in the movie, was at the heart of what made the skit funny. I could say that MacGruber, being a pompous blowhard, is best viewed for short periods and then blown sky high. If I were to spend time analyzing MacGruber, I’d probably speak of the skits as having a firm place in the history of a certain style of comedy… that they were each a joke of the same kind, like a knock-knock joke. I could point out how Will Forte’s general comedic vision has to do with repetition. He likes to do something absurd over and over. Pound a point home until it’s funny. There’s a kind of disbelief in laughing at Forte’s comedy. What the hell is he doing? Can you believe it? He’s genuinely insane! There is a nervous twinge in the best laughter that Will Forte causes. It could be said that he parodies insanity itself.
But really, why bother? “MacGruber”, the film, is so bad that it defies analysis. It tries to parody action films of the 1980’s. It fails. It tries to make MacGruber a quirky, crazy, yet loveable hero. It fails. It tries to be shockingly violent and gross for the purpose of humor. It fails. It seems clear that the idea with “MacGruber”, the film, was to try to put it so far over the top… to try to make the explosions bigger, the poop and dick jokes nastier, the gore spatteringlier… that it couldn’t be ignored. “MacGruber”, the film, is meant to shock and alarm in a way that MacGruber, the skit, never did. It fails. I can’t say if this is all WIll Forte’s fault or perhaps the fault of those around him. I’d like to think it’s the latter, of course, but it doesn’t matter anyway. The film is dismal.
Initially, I was pleased to hear the film had an R rating. That seemed to suggest it wouldn’t pander to a middle-of-the-road sensibility. Somehow, though, that’s exactly what it does. “MacGruber” is frat-boy crazy, meaning it’s not really crazy at all. There’s nothing tense or dangerous or provocative about it. The humor, if it can be called that, rests completely on the kinds of things that make 13-year-olds laugh, and perhaps that’s not giving 13-year-olds enough credit. I suspect that a MacGruber film that didn’t have the leeway that an R rating includes could actually have been funnier, as it tried to tiptoe around the kinds of things it shows. For some comedy, an R rating is liberating, as it unshackles the writers and performers. For others, it’s an excuse to dwell on toilet humor. In the case of “MacGruber”, there is actual toilet humor, as in a joke about a toilet and poop, along with the general style of toilet humor. A PG-13 rating would have allowed “MacGruber”’s target audience to actually see the film, and might have made it better for those of us who left that age, and an appreciation for tired shock comedy, in the past.
The film isn’t utterly devoid of laughs. The parody aspect works well once or twice: there’s a section that starts in the style of a typical 80’s sex scene, ala Top Gun, and quickly devolves into a stark angle on a sweaty, grunting, climaxing MacGruber. At a couple of other points, watching MacGruber desperately offer to perform fellatio isn’t entirely without humor. But even at its funniest moments, which can be counted on one hand, MacGruber’s sleaziness is unlikeable. Unfortunately, we don’t even get to see him blow up at the end. This movie attempts to mock action movie cliches, and in the process, winds up in the blast area of another one: “MacGruber” is a bomb.
Directed by: Jorma Taccone
Release Date: May 21, 2010
Run Time: 90 Minutes
Country: USA
Rated: R
Distributor: Michaels-Goldwyn
