Ka-Pow!

I must admit that I was actually surprised to learn that the Macgruber movie totally bombed at the box office last week....
I mean, I wasn't expecting the picture to be a blockbuster or anything; I just thought it might do OK. That's all -- merely OK, ya know?


But Macgruber couldn't even accomplish that. The film was a total flop in every sense. Despite a wide release and a fairly respectable advertising campaign, it fell short of even breaking the top five for its opening weekend. And that got me to thinking....

Why? Why did Macgruber wind up with such an embarrassing tally? Ever since the project was announced, I'd heard people questioning how anyone could get a 90 minute feature film out of one of Saturday Night Live's shortest sketches, but brushed off such disparaging talk. Someone would say, "All Macgruber does is blow himself up after 15 seconds. How can you stretch that to a movie?" and I'd think, "DUH! Isn't it obvious that there's plenty of potential here to make a comedy about the CHARACTER of Macgruber without just expanding on the sketch concept??? There's lots of stuff Macgruber could do. Get your head out of the ground -- this Macgruber guy is GOLDEN!"

Looks like I was wrong.

I dunno. I don't think the movie bombed so hard because of MACGRUBER, per se; I think the real problem is that everyone knew this was a Lorne Michaels-produced, Saturday Night Live movie. The SNL character-to-feature-film track record has been pretty lousy over the past 15 years or so, and people are smart enough to just stay away. I mean, check out these SNL motion pictures. How many of you got burned by at least one of them???

(The cult, or DVD, hits.)

(Really? Oh, REALLY?)

(What a shocker that no one would want to see a movie about a character that was too creepy to stomach even in five minute comedy sketches.)

See, Wayne's World came out of nowhere in the early 90s, and did quite well, so Lorne Michaels and others at various movie studios apparently made the assumption that they could turn other Saturday Night Live characters into feature films. Needless to say, things didn't exactly pan out. In fact, even Wayne's World 2, for all the hype, had a lackluster box office performance. And let's not forget Coneheads.

The bottom line, I think, is that no SNL character can successfully be adapted into a major motion picture and actually get butts into seats. The movie going public has become saavy; folks aren't going to fall for it anymore. Even if a good adaptation comes along, it doesn't have a chance. It's a shame we'll never see this charming young woman with a full-length film:


Oh, well. At least I can proudly say that I was among the very few people to have paid for a Macgruber ticket during the film's opening weekend. Let's take a look.

Macgruber (2010)
http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1470023/


Netflix description:
Based on the "Saturday Night Live" sketch, this action-packed comedy stars Will Forte as incompetent former special ops agent MacGruber. When he's called back into action to deactivate archenemy Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), MacGruber is on the case. Now, he must thwart Von Cunth's plans to destroy Washington, D.C., with a nuclear warhead. Kristen Wiig, Ryan Phillippe, Maya Rudolph and Powers Boothe co-star.

First of all, let me reiterate that Macgruber is a shameless rip-off of my own movie proposal: Maximum Extreme 2. While I am indeed getting very tired of Hollywood stealing my ideas, I'll let it slide for the purposes of this review.

Macgruber is about a former Navy SEAL, Green Beret, NYPD Detective-weapons specialist who is asked by the military to come out of retirement to retrieve a nuclear warhead that's been stolen by terrorists. After some pretty amusing deliberations, Macgruber agrees, and goes about reassembling his old special ops team, which appears to be made up almost entirely of professional wrestlers. Of course, the team gets all blowed up about ten minutes after organizing, and Macgruber must go about the rest of his mission with the help of a less ambitious skeleton crew. Besides himself, the new outfit consists of the lovely Vickie Saint Elmo, played by Kristen Wiig, and the capable Lieutenant Dixon Piper, played by Ryan Phillipe. Together, they track down the criminal mastermind behind the weapon theft, and proceed to blow lots of stuff up.

I gotta say that Macgruber had plenty going for it, and I was optimistic as I entered the theater that this would be a comedy-action picture done right. After all, it features Will Forte and Kristen Wiig, two of Saturday Night Live's most talented performers, and the concept was clearly hilarious. "As long as they don't rely on gross-out, bathroom humor, this movie should be all right," I thought. Well...guess what?

Macgruber relies too heavily on bathroom humor (sigh). It dwells on gags that really should have been used as background filler while haphazardly passing over what should have been the real the meat of the experience, and that greatly disappointed me. For instance, there's a bit in which Macgruber places a celery stick in his "you-know-what" and prances around in front of some foes in order to create a diversion (I guess it's one of his favorite field tricks). Kinda funny, sure, but the scene drags on for far too long. AND THEN, it's revisited at least twice later on. C'mon, Will Forte, that's too cheap of a joke to keep throwing at us. You can do much better than that.

I also wish Macgruber's supposedly legendary ability to fashion explosives out of common items in tight situations had been explored more. See, throughout this film, our hero is depicted as completely incompetent -- he screws up every operation he undertakes, often leaving the dirty work to his underlings. Now, that's just fine (in fact, it even generates a lot of this picture's biggest laughs); but for me to like the guy or film at all, he's got to come through with SOMETHING every now and then. I mean, why does the military view him as such an asset when he can't even hold a gun? I wanted to see Macgruber make a bomb out of some old erasers, paperclips and Q-tips at least a COUPLE TIMES, dagnabbit! Instead, the only remotely-cool technique he employs in the entire movie is a throat-ripping martial arts move. I needed a little more than that to really buy the dude.

Val Kilmer shows up here as the villain, Dieter Von Cunth, and does his best work since Real Genius. He and Forte play out an old rivalry quite hilariously in Macgruber, and their final showdown saves the film from being a complete disappointment. It was also a treat to watch Kristen Wiig and Forte play off each other. I've expressed admiration for Wiig before, and hope to see her in more films doing just the kind of work she excels at in this film.


So, is Macgruber worth watching? Meh, maybe on DVD. It had its moments, but overall, the film makes the very same fatal mistakes that I'd hoped Will Forte would be smart enough to avoid. This could have been an hysterical send-up of action movies and TV shows, with a well-fleshed out backstory to support its main character. Sadly, too much time is wasted here on jokes that I could have written when I was 15.

But suppose that's the point? Perhaps I'm missing the true appeal of Macgruber. What if I misread his potential, and went into this movie expecting the wrong thing? Maybe he really IS nothing more than a dumb throw-away gag designed to attract ratings and ticket sales from teenage boys. Hmmm. Well, now that I think about it, that would be stupid, since Macgruber the movie is rated R! Why in the world would they allow a film aimed at the young demographic to have an R rating? And further more, how come the theme song isn't played...

**Cue explosion**


All right, fine. I get it. Macgruber's a one-trick pony. Whatever.

3 out of 5.

b.