By Eddy
When a movie makes 4 million its first weekend, there is an obvious sign that something was wrong with the movie. When someone decides to watch the movie even after hearing about its anemic box office receipts…then likely there is something wrong with that person. Not to say that low box office receipts are an accurate indicator of a movies’ worth. There are plenty of art house movie that would be ecstatic to have the problem of only making 4 million upon its debut. Unfortunately, MacGruber is not one of those movies.
There always has been a stigma about movies that originated from Saturday Night Live. Actually for the most part that stigma is well earned…most of those movies sucked…epically. Of course, there have been exceptions such as the first couple of Austin Powers , Coneheads and Wayne’s World . Unfortunately, those successes have been buried under A Night at the Roxbury , The Ladies Man , Superstar and finally MacGruber .
While not totally deserving of rotten vegetable thrown at the screen, MacGruber does nothing to redeem itself as a movie. Staring Will Forte as the title character, we learn why a movie studio can greenlight a movie based on a skit where the characters always die in some explosion, and the answer is because they have no clue what they are doing. It seems the same brains that thought the Geico Cavemen would make a good sitcom believed that dwindling SNL fan base would come out by the dozens to watch a mildly annoying reoccurring character from their show do things for almost an hour and a half. Leaning heavily on the cliché’s of most 80’s movies as well as most crappy SNL movies (clueless character, unrealistic situations, crude humor etc) we see MacGruber , an ex-special forces soldier who doesn’t use a gun, brought out of hiding after the death of his wife to battle against the well organized forces of the man who killed his wife (Val Kilmer in a fat suit, what? It’s NOT a fat suit?).
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