Less is more. But sometimes even less is too much.
Take “MacGruber.”
The lame comedy film derived from a popular recurring sketch on NBC’s “Saturday Night Live” is just 88 minutes long. And that’s still 86 minutes too many.
The single joke that has propelled the MacGruber skits — which began on “SNL” a few years back with Will Forte as the incompetent boob of a title character — is that, with seconds to go before a bomb is going to explode, the dim bulb gets so involved with whatever personal angst he is going through that — oops — big kaboom.
The twist is that on the original, ABC hour-long action drama “MacGyver,” Richard Dean Anderson played a secret agent who was the exact opposite — he was endlessly resourceful about using materials at hand to get out of sticky situations.
It works well enough on the show — where "MacGruber" isn’t even really as much as sketch as a sketchlette — a quickie filler that leads into a commericail break. But that hasn’t stopped it from becoming yet another in “SNL” producer Lorne Michaels’ long line of attempts to capitalize on the popularity of a recurring bit from the show.
Most of the resulting films, starting with “The Blues Brothers” in 1980 and including “Coneheads” (1993) and “A Night at the Roxbury” (1998), have fizzled as badly as “MacGruber” does. The exception: The first “Wayne’s World” in 1992.
The reason most of these movies stink is simple: They’re all concept, no context.
Recurring short sketches work because a single joke or punch line resonates week after week. Familiarity breeds popularity. But a movie needs more going for it than a single joke. It needs context, substantial characters and enough of a story to pull viewers in for a minimum of 90 minutes.
In “SNL” movie after “SNL” movie, there’s no more to a lead character or set-up than what we’ve already seen in the source sketch on “SNL” week after week. The Blue Brothers or the Coneheads turn out to have no hidden depths, no intriguing back-stories. And thus, no reason for moviegoers actually to care about them.
Possibly in hopes of avoiding the pitfall of being merely an extended sketch, the creative team behind “MacGruber” — writer-director Jorma Taccone and cowriters Forte and John Solomon — attempt to send-up big budget action films of the ’80s and early ‘90s, the movies that made Bruce Willis, Sylvester Stallone and the current governor of California into huge stars.
The problem is that those films were in many ways self-mocking already, and certainly became so as their aging leading man took repeated breathers from saving the world by injecting ever bigger doses of comedy relief into the scripts. What was “True Lies,” Arnold Schwarzenegger’s 1994 blockbuster, if not a knowing wink at the entire genre?
To successfully satirize those movies, “MacGruber” would have to embrace their clichés and then smartly turn them inside out. Instead, it hugs close the clichés, including multiple shootouts and exploding fireballs, making only the feeblest of attempts to mock them.
Rather than just using those movies as a launching pad for its own lunacy, “MacGruber” insists on ploddingly playing out its clichéd action hero plot: MacGruber’s nemesis, Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), has stolen a nuclear warhead and MacGruber must stop him before he can use it.
The single element of “MacGruber” that even comes close to hitting the right sneering note is Kilmer’s portrayal of the villain, Von Cunth. (It is a sign of the film’s lack of cleverness that the character’s last name is spelled with a “C” rather than a “K.”)
Kilmer gets exactly right the silky self-confidence and purring menace, not to mention the ponytail, of the interchangeable parade of preening bad guy smoothies who traipsed through all those earlier movies.
But most of “MacGruber” is devoted to Forte stumbling and bumbling and baring his backside. When a movie resorts not once but multiple times to having its hero moon the audience, sophisticated comic inspiration is clearly lacking.
For much of the movie, I just kept looking at my watch or hoping that Betty White, who took part in “MacGruber” sketches during her recent fabulous stint as guest host on “SNL,” would pop up to save the day and the movie. No such luck.
