You aren’t supposed to think movies based on Saturday Night Live sketches are funny. Particularly not when that sketch is 90 seconds worth of an inept MacGyver parody who gets distracted while disarming a bomb and blows up. This was made even clearer to me when I posted to my Facebook that I was going to see MacGruber. I had a litany of responses telling me how stupid the sketch is and how stupid the movie would be. I like the sketches, I like star Will Forte and I really liked this movie.

Obviously you can’t take a repetitive sketch like MacGruber and turn it into a full length movie and only rely on the sorts  of jokes you used in the sketch. Here, they cast MacGruber as a former war hero who faked his own death after his wife (Maya Rudolf) was murdered on their wedding day by his rival Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). When Cunth steals a Russian nuclear weapon, Col James Faith (Powers Boothe) finds MacGruber living as a monk and brings him back into action. MacGuber teams up with old team member Vicki St Elmo (Kristen Wiig) and fresh recruit Lt Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe). In the years since he was apparently competent, MacGruber has lost more than a few steps and is now cowardly, incompetent and borderline mentally retarded.

By adopting cheesy 80’s action movies like Rambo and Top Gun as its framework, co-writer/director Jorma Taccone gives MacGruber much more to do than rehash the sketches and the parody here is very sharp and on point. The humor is very much inline with Wayne’s World or Austin Powers and is very effective. The difference between those films and this one is that the content in MacGruber is jacked up to hard R. The material is enormously vulgar with extreme language, gore and much more of Will Fote’s ass than you were probably bargaining for.

Like the character himself, MacGruber builds its jokes out of a variety of odds and ends to make something more that the sum of its parts. Thankfully, the finished product is more effective than anything that MacGruber himself will ever make. The movie doesn’t just do one kind of comedy. There is the parody aspect that is very similar to the Naked Gun series at times which as mentioned is very well done. It is clear that writers Forte, Taccone and John Solomon are fans of 80’s action and they know it very well. This is built up with a variety of jokes from slapsticky visual jokes, to enormously effective music and sound cues, to shocking sex scenes, to dialogue that can be clever and can be silly and is often both at the same time.

The material would have fallen flat had the performances not held up but as it is the actors here understand what is expected of them. Powers Boothe and Ryan Phillippe, as the straight men,  are acting in a serious action movie whereas Forte’s MacGruber is in a world all his own filled with absurdity and nonsense. Wiig and Kilmer are stuck somewhere between with Kilmer in particular seeming to have fun invoking how his Top Secret character Nick Rivers might have turned out had he turned evil following beef with a crazy bomb expert. In this kind of comedy the players have to not recognize how ridiculous any of it is. The cast does this fairly well. Dixon recognizes MacGruber is an idiot but the title character is just competent enough to keep the mission going despite his ample amounts of idiosyncrasies. Most of this is accomplished via gratuitous throat ripping and creative implementation of  stalks of celery.

There are a lot of people who hate on SNL, SNL movies and who think that this is a stupid idea, the movie should never have been made and anyone who likes it is an idiot. That is too bad. A lot of the humor here is silly, or stupid if you prefer, but it also happens to be really funny. If you are too good for silliness and can’t let go of preconceived notions then you are probably best served avoiding MacGruber. It is definitely not a movie for all tastes. I happen to be a fan of SNL and not the fair weather type who thinks every cast but the one they grew up on is worthless. I also know that not all SNL movies are any good. Some of them are, and MacGruber is one of the best of them. It stands right up next to Wayne’s World and Blues Brothers and fans of SNL should be pleased.

Conclusion [8.0 out of 10]

They could have made this a one note joke and relied on nothing but rehashing the sketch over and over again but instead they fleshed the concept out in a way that made sense and filled the movie with a variety of different sorts of jokes which generally all hit. Is MacGruber some kind of high brow cinematic masterpiece? No and it is not meant to be. It is an absurd movie by design and it embraces that absurdity with open arms. MacGruber may not bet for everyone, particularly if a person has a ‘I am too hip to enjoy silly humor’ stick of celery in his or her ass, but  it is very funny and offers up far more laughs than anyone imagined it would. Classic MacGruber.