MacGruber

Floro's late to the party review - MacGruber  

 

Will Forte and Kristen Wiig effectively end Ryan Phillippe's career alongside an enjoyably aware Val Kilmer and a well placed piece of celery. If you aren't one of my 7 friends that would've seen and enjoyed this movie already, you probably should not see this movie ever. That said, there's a lot of fun (for me) to be had in this extremely obscene spin off of a tiny SNL skit.

This is Jorma Taccone's debut into film directing. You likely know Taccone as one-third of the comedy team Lonely Island and their work as the princes of Digital Shorts. He directed the MacGruber skits on SNL, and he definitely earned his chance to move it to the big screen. This film was destined to break even at best, and I think Taccone helped (more than hurt) the movie's chances of pulling that off.

Seriously though, what happened to Ryan Phillippe? I mean I Know What You Did Last Summer was 1997, Cruel Intentions happened in 1999, and by 2004 his name was being published wrong in the credits of "Best Picture of 2004" Crash (or as I call it, "RACISM COINCIDENCES"). Don't tell me he meant to spell his name "Phillipe", he was 15 people below Chris "Ludacris" Bridges in billing.

Mr. Bridges gets face space on the poster. Also I hated this movie.

Maybe Phillippe hit his ceiling early, and found his spot as "12th billed police officer that makes you say Hey...wasn't he in...things?". He certainly got paid way more than I do to read the lines well enough that Will Forte can just ad-lib insanity, and they got enough takes to put together a movie. He just didn't add anything to this movie.

I think that's the bottom line for this movie. "Just didn't add anything". Wiig is great in the 3 scenes they really utilize her, and Forte continues to find ways to crack me up with his brand of craziness. He will say just about anything wearing just about anything surrounded by anything, and that can lend itself to some things that I find hilarious (see also: 30 Rock and How I Met Your Mother). Kilmer is really collecting a check in this movie. He provides a few brief moments of interesting, and made me kind of wish it was someone more predictably unpredictable, like Steven Seagal or Gary Busey, in the rest. Not that there's a lot of source material to work from, but even the leads really just didn't add anything.

Sufficiently ridiculous throughout, and Will Forte should scream like a lunatic in more things. Not enough explosions, but enough jaguar sounds with the few there were. The team of WWE wrestlers they borrowed were all surprisingly great. The praise of "Best SNL movie since Wayne's World" may be deserved, but that's a low bar to clear. I think the best stuff happened early. The rest, like MacGruber's plans, they just kinda saw what happened. Glad I watched it - once.