Films based on Saturday Night Live sketches have about as good a track record as Elizabeth Taylor’s marriages. And like Liz’s marriages, these films always sound good on paper but just don’t work in the real world (although I’ve heard that her time with Larry Fortensky was spent mostly under the sheets which makes me both curious and repulsed).
The only SNL movie that proved to be a hit was Wayne’s World in 1992, and I think that was because they threw out most of the story and settled on a series of funny jokes strung together with a very loose premise. It’s Pat and Stuart Saves His Family combined made less than one million dollars at the box office.
You know the old Hollywood saying (no, not for a good time call 555-Lohan) if you’ve failed, repeat yourself. This weekend we’ll see SNL’s Will Forte as MacGruber. He’s the guy on the show that doesn’t stand out. The only guy who is more of a channel changer is Kenan Thompson, it’s almost as if all those years of Kenan and Kel never existed. If you haven’t seen the sketch on SNL, it’s always the same idea. MacGruber is trapped in a room where a bomb is about to go off, as he is attempting to defuse it using a gum wrapper or a paper clip, he is sidetracked by something stupid and the bomb goes off. The first time I saw it I thought the roughly 60 second sketch was very funny, but then the sketches kept coming and the joke is always the same. How do you make a 90 minute film when each sketch basically repeats the same one joke? (The short answer would be you don’t.) It seems the producers thought the answer was in hiring Val Kilmer.
Val used to be big, so big he was once cast as Batman. Aside from Spartan, he’s lately been doing supporting roles in films that don’t require his full concentration (kind of like watching one of the Kardashian girls drive a car). It sounds like good stunt casting to throw Val in as the bad guy, since compared to Will Forte the guy can really act, but would Val have taken this gig ten years ago? Probably not. If he had taken it ten years ago, then that would have been quite a coup for the producers to hire him.
The filmmakers have tried to differentiate this SNL film from past ones by ramping up the language which earned the film an R rating. But since Judd Apatow arrived on the scene, most comedies have been rated R for language anyway. When are comedies rated R for nudity going to back into fashion the way they were in the eighties? I can see funny on TV, I go to the movies to see naked people. While an R rating for an SNL film might be something new and different (since you would never hear the characters utter those words on TV) it’s really old school compared to other film comedies of the past five years.
The only reason to see this film is Kristen Wiig. She’s also the only reason to watch SNL (unless Betty White is hosting and shows those young whipper snappers how real comedy is done). Someone needs to give her a movie (she is currently developing a film with Judd Apatow producing). She upstages everyone she’s on screen with, but I’m thinking even she can’t save MacGruber. Throw in the fact that this idea is based on an old 80’s series starring Richard Dean Anderson and executive produced by Henry Winkler (sans leather jacket) and you need to wonder why this film is being released at all (obviously to make money) when it could keep running the same one joke premise on SNL and forcing me to turn off the television at 11:45pm.
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