MacGruber

Introduction

It's a fine line you tread when deciding to take a short but successful skit and extend it into a feature film, and the latest in the long line of those who have attempted this is Will Forte with his Saturday Night Live skit MacGruber. Only a few have succeeded, The Blues Brothers and Wayne's World spring immediately to mind, but many others have failed. So what is this one about?

MacGruber is a modern spoof of 80's action hero sans gun, MacGyver. MacGruber is the only American hero who has served as Green Beret, Navy SEAL and Army Ranger, been awarded 16 Purple Hearts, 3 Congressional medals of Honour and 7 Presidential medals of bravery.  And on top of all that, the only man still brave enough to wear a mullet...

It's been ten long years since the death of his wife Casey (Maya Rudolph) at the altar, and MacGruber has spent the time since pretending to be dead and living a life of peace in a monastery (think Rambo III) when his old CO Colonel James Faith (Powers Boothe) tracks him down.

Faith has a mission that only MacGruber stands a chance in pulling off, his old nemesis Dieter Von c***h (Val Kilmer) has stolen a nuclear missile and plans to use it. Initially MacGruber turns Faith down but is soon drawn back into the fray.

Assembling a crack team of hard men, MacGruber then blows them up. Down but not out, MacGruber then puts together a second team consisting of straight arrow Lt Piper (Ryan Phillipe) and Vicki St Elmo (Kristen Wiig), his dead wife's best friend. With his detachable blaupunkt programmed only for soft rock and his plan to keep Vicki disguised as MacGruber for as long as possible, this expert team will hunt some c***h and save the world in the process...

Picture

Nothing wrong with the picture except that rather annoying Universal banner that once more appears intermittently across the centre of the
screen. Please stop it...

Extras

None on the DVD, there are apparently some on the blu-ray but as I didn't get this format I'm not including them in the review...

Overall

I'm not a fan of spoof films at the best of times, in fact only the Airplane series and Naked Gun have been able to tickle my feather. I suspect this is because spoof's in general are best served in minute portions and struggle to remain funny over 90 minutes or so. And so it proves with MacGruber, who is really only spoofing Richard Dean Anderson's MacGyver. This might well work in an SNL sketch that lasts a couple of minutes but a full film? Well actually I've seen a couple of the skits on youTube and quite frankly I don't think it works there either. Oh well...

I really don't know what Powers Boothe and Ryan Phillipe are in this for, it is a waste of their talents and both are brutally underused despite Phillipe having a co-starring role. Val Kilmer on the other hand probably has no choice, although the only note worthy thing of his cardboard cutout villain is his name, which leads to a series of c***h jokes that even I couldn't help resorting to ealier in this review.

Forte tries a little too hard to play this spoof role seriously but quickly runs out of 80's cliches to adhere to, which is probably why you see him carry his detachable Blaupunkt car radio everywhere. The spoof on MacGyver's hatred of guns really doesn't work, despite the reliance on a naked distraction with a stick of celery shoved up his butt (yes, this is a spoiler but frankly not much of one if you think about it...). The least said about offering his services to first Piper and then Faith in order to get back on the case is pathetic and severely overdone, as are the two sex scenes that are rather badly done whilst also bringing to mind Team America.

It is hard to think of anything remotely positive about this film, it really is about 90 minutes too long...