When You Want Action, Call Mac

Saturday Night Live has not had the best track record when it comes to spinning its characters out into their own properties. While there have been a couple of notable successes – The Blues Brothers in 1980, and then Wayne’s World in 1992 – there have been far more misses than hits. Most of the time, and Saturday Night Live films are brought up, people have visions of Coneheads, It’s Pat, Stuart Saves His Family, Superstar, and The Ladies Man, all lesser efforts that came out in the wake of Wayne’s World’s success, and most of which failed to even recoup their budgets at the Box Office. In the case of It’s Pat, the failure was so bad that the movie, despite costing $8 Mil to make, the film barely broke $60 Thousand at the Box Office. It couldn’t even make over $100K. No one wanted more of Pat.

MacGruber, released in 2010, was another Saturday Night Live film. Its failure to entice audiences at the Box Office wasn’t unexpected as, by that point, the stink coming off Saturday Night Live films was palpable. All you had to do was say, “this used to be a Saturday Night Live sketch,” and people would actively stay away. MacGruber failing to make back its slim $10 Mil budget was a foregone conclusion. Even with a successful character, a decent cast, and a genre ripe for lampooning, there was almost no way that MacGruber was going to be a hit.

No, what’s really notable about MacGruber was that, with its 2010 failure, it also became the last movie to be made based on a Saturday Night Live sketch. After this film Lorne Michaels and his team decided that money would be better spent doing anything else with it. Lighting it on fire would be less costly than continuing to make Saturday Night Live films. Which is really interesting because despite this being a Saturday Night Live movie, and despite audiences wanting nothing to do with it, MacGruber is actually one of the more watchable films in this weird little subgenre.

I think one of the things actively working against the film (besides the Saturday Night Live name) is the fact that the movie is a parody of a television series that had been off the air for nearly two decades. MacGruber is a parody of MacGuyver, a television series that aired from 1985 through 1992, featuring a hero who could find his way out of any situation by building homemade devices from the objects around him. Locked in a building with a bomb going off, just give old Mac a bit of wire, an apple, and three dimes and suddenly he’d have the bomb diffused and would ride out on a motorcycle he built himself. It’s a character ripe for parody, which is why it worked well as a sketch on Saturday Night Live, where any wacky character can function for just a few minutes even if people no longer remember the source material. But it’s a bigger stretch to expect people to go to the theater for a film based on the same joke.

Not that this is the only joke in MacGruber. Hell, that’s not even its primary joke. The film is smart enough to focus the story on the character himself, letting his natural buffoonery and general idiocy carry the story. Mac (Will Forte, reprising his role from the sketches), is a retired special forces warrior, a man thought dead after his greatest nemesis, Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), blew up Mac’s wife, Casey Janine Fitzpatrick (Maya Rudolph), in front of him on the day of their wedding. Mac lost it, going into hiding and giving him his warrior ways… right up until he’s called back into service by his old commanding officer, Colonel Jim Faith (Powers Boothe).

It seems that Cunth has somehow gotten his hands on a Russian nuclear weapon and he plans to do something nefarious with it. The military isn’t sure what or how, so they need Mac to come back into service to track down Cunth and serve him some serious justices. To that end, mac puts together a team… and once they blow up due to an accident with some homemade C4 he then builds another team consisting of a special ops agent, Lieutenant Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe), and Mac's old friend, Vicki Gloria St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig). Together the three of them have to kick ass and take names and they fight their way through Cunth’s men all so they can, as Mac puts it, “pound some Cunth.”

Despite its MacGuyver setup, the MacGruber film is more a sendup of the action genre in general. It’s packed with shootouts, explosions, big, burly, sweaty men, and lots of violence. It’s a crass, gory, expletive-filled movie, and it likes it that way. That’s one of its main jokes, in fact, contrasting its massive, action-movie desires against the idiot man-child main character at the center of it all. Mac is the worst man to lead a mission like this (despite everyone saying he’s the best at what he does), and the movie loves reveling in his screw ups while explosions go on all around him.

What really sells it, naturally, is Forte. He takes a character who is hugely unlikable, Mac, and makes them into someone worth watching. You never like Mac. In fact I’d go so far as to say you’ll hate just about everything about him. But because he’s the subject of so much ridicule from the film, with the movie never letting up on making Mac the butt of every joke it can, you actually end up enjoying what the film has to offer. Mac is a guy from another time, another era of action, and he’s permanently stuck there, thinking he’s the coolest guy around. The film lets him, and us, know that is far from the truth, and it gets a lot of humor out of it.

Credit is also due to the rest of the cast. Wiig is delightfully airheaded as St. Elmo, Mac’s friend who really thinks he’s just as cool as he says. Phillippe acts as a solid foil, seeing through all the bullshit, permanently walking around with a look of disdain on his face. And then there’s Kilmer, playing his character with just the right amount of Steven Seagal humorlessness. Kilmer, a classically-trained actor, didn’t do comedy very often, but when he did he got into the role like none other. Kilmer’s performance here could almost work in a real action flick, which is part of what makes him so ridiculous and so solid in the role.

Despite all this, I will note that MacGruber does struggle to sustain itself for its full 91 minute length. The jokes in the film are great, but there’s probably 75 minutes of real material here and the film could have used a bit of editing, across its full runtime, to get the pacing down and make everything smoother. It’s a parody with big ambitions, which I appreciate, but it doesn’t always have enough jokes to pack into its runtime to really sill the space. More humor, or less time spent faffing around, could have made this film even better.

And I don’t really think this film would work for most people. It’s juvenile and silly, with a streak of humor befitting its manchild. It’s the perfect kind of film for the thirteen-year-olds in the audience, except it’s a very hard-R film, with lots of male nudity and more f-bombs than any rating system would allow. The very audience it was made for couldn’t see it in theaters, and no one else wanted to. So, despite it being a pretty funny film, the movie failed to catch on, leading to yet another failed Saturday Night Live film. The last one, as it stands.

MacGruber is the perfect kind of film to stumble on when you’re browsing a streaming service and channel surfing through cable, but it was never going to be a hit. Hell, I like the movie and I had no interest in seeing it in theaters. It’s an ambitiously silly movie that simply didn’t understand who its audience could be. That makes it a great film to discover some afternoon when you’re looking for something to watch, a sleeper that can delight because you had no clue what to expect, but it was never, ever going to be a hit.