Studio: Uni Dist Corp. (mca) Release Date: 09/07/2010 Run time: 96 minutes Rating: R
No comic explosion, but not quite a dud, no Wayne's World, but not The Ladies Man either, MacGruber does manage to pull off the seemingly impossible mission of expanding a 90-second one-joke Saturday Night Live sketch into a feature film. What's next: "Toonces the Cat Who Could Drive a Car"? In those MacGruber sketches, Will Forte's mullet-maned hero "makes life-saving inventions out of household materials" but always gets sidetracked as the bomb he's defusing ticks down to its last 20 seconds. Blown up for the big screen, MacGruber finds a bigger payoff whenever the film sidetracks from the standard-issue '80s action movie plot, as witness MacGruber's deranged revenge fantasies toward a driver who hurled a drive-by insult at his car. MacGruber's secret weapon is Val Kilmer as a megalomaniacal villain (his name, not appropriate for a family website, is a profanely puerile running joke) with a stolen Russian nuclear warhead and a grudge against MacGruber. MacGruber's somewhat less than A-team includes Vicki St. Elmo (SNL MVP Kristin Wiig), more into her music than into saving the world, and straight arrow Lieutenant Piper (Ryan Phillippe), who begins to question MacGruber's unorthodox tactics (one involving a diversionary stalk of celery is just one of the film's more jaw-dropping gross-out gags). MacGruber may not set the world on fire, but the insanely committed Forte, like MacGruber, will do anything, no matter how obscene, to complete his mission. Mission pretty much accomplished, particularly in a sex scene that is the most outrageous of its kind since Team America: World Police (albeit, thankfully, not as graphic). --Donald Liebenson