Too disappointed to come up with a caption.
I am no Saturday Night Live fan. Over the years I might have watched a couple of episodes a year, and that was mainly if there was either a guest star or an event that became newsworthy and suggested it might be worth looking into.
But in the last couple years I did obviously see enough episodes to catch MacGruber, the MacGuyver wannabe that frustrated the hell out of his ladyfriend and the guest star just long enough so that the bomb he was supposed to disarm went off and killed all three. It didn’t matter why, a distraction, an anecdote, a story, whatever.
They blew up.
Every time.
For some reason this amused me, the segments never went more than 2 minutes and often his dodgy theme song went for at least a quarter of that scant time. So when I heard that the MacGruber film was not only on the way but it had enjoyed some of the best early reviews for any SNL film since Wayne’s World (need I remind you that was about 20 years ago?) I became very expectant, almost aroused with anticipation.
Now… It’s here… And it sucks!
I am so filthy that I can’t list all the reasons why MacGruber is nothing more than a lazy, lousy piece of crap…
No…
Wait…
Yes I can.
Here is the joke, almost the only joke. The first 10 minutes of the film has various people who should know praising MacGruber. Apparently so we are told his exploits are legendary and include many awards for bravery (16 Purple Hearts!), numerous amazing and heroic exploits. Oh and he is an expert in basically EVERYTHING!
The last hour of the film has MacGruber showing that he is actually an incompetent, cowardly, disloyal, stupid, disorganized, inept and unreliable idiot. Again, that’s the joke. So every time he messes up it is apparently hilarious, or it must have been to the writers who found it so funny that they didn’t bother writing any more jokes to y’know top it off.
It reminds me of almost every Will Ferrell film where he is great because we are told so. He is either a great Anchorman, or a Pro Basketball player, or an amazing Nascar racer, but only because we are told so despite all evidence to the contrary.
Fuck if that’s funny I will write a film called “white-black guy” (Coming in the Fall!), in which Paul Giamatti spends 90 minutes walking around telling people he is black, but never joking about it or taking it anything less than completely seriously. That’ll be hilarious…
The plot is irrelevant aside from introducing a bad guy named Cunthz (Val Kilmer), only the “hz” is very often silent, also apparently meant to be hilarious. Even the 93rd time they milk it.
I was so looking forward to this, expecting it to be the first great comedy for a while that this… thing that they spat out at the audience is so disappointing… So insulting…
Fuck it. I’m done.
Final Rating – 5.5 / 10. Should I be upset that they managed to cadge more laughs out of every 90 second skit than in this entire abomination? Yes I think I should.
