Review: ‘MacGruber’ helps redefine skit-based cinema

BY TODD GILCHRIST Last week in Austin, Texas, Hollywood News was able to attend the first-ever screening of MacGruber, director Jorma Taccone’s big-screen adaptation of the Saturday Night Live skit of the same name. Although it’s hardly the sort of film that requires deeper reflection – it’s about a mulleted, would-be bomb-defuser who’s not above sticking vegetables in inappropriate places in order to get the job done – it’s been turning over and over in my head for the past week. Because more than just being the first SNL-related film in almost a decade, MacGruber may prove to be the one that resuscitates the show as a screen property, since its small-screen callbacks, theatrical references and shockingly raunchy original ideas effortlessly come together in one of not only the best spinoffs, but the best all-around comedies in recent memory. Forte reprises his role as MacGruber, a high-level government operative who retires from service after his wife Casey (Maya Rudolph) is blown up on their wedding day. Called back into action when his archenemy Dieter Von Cunth (Kilmer) absconds with a nuclear warhead, MacGruber reunites with his former partner Vicki St. Elmo (Wiig) to recover the bomb and bring down Von Cunth. But MacGruber quickly realizes that his flashy, improvisational style doesn’t work quite as well as it used to, and he reluctantly must turn to help from a new recruit named Dixon Piper (Philippe) in order to carry out his mission and repair his sullied reputation. While I never expected a film version of MacGruber to be a neverending series of near-miss explosions, viewers familiar with its original incarnation will be relieved to know that writer-director Taccone and his co-creators Forte and John Solomon has fleshed out the character’s mythology to something suitable for feature length. Somewhat obviously, the character was conceived as a parody of Richard Dean Anderson’s iconic tinkerer MacGyver, but the screenwriters expanded their cinematic palette to include the language of 1980s action movies, complete with noisy exposition, broad characterizations and absurdly overstated visuals. There’s a charm to the film’s hidden-in-plain-sight monologues about motivation and background precisely because the filmmakers are so aware how obvious they sound, but they nevertheless provide important information even when they’re sending up those old-school lists of accolades and credentials that once signified we should take someone seriously on screen. Meanwhile, Taccone’s direction, augmented by the cinematography of Brandon Trost, perfectly recreates the style of [...]