MacGruber fails where Austin Powers succceded

This movie is the latest in a long, sad line of movies based on repetitive sketches from Saturday Night Live and if that makes you happy, well, you’re pretty much alone.

MacGruber is 90 minutes of poor — not pure — spoof. It began with a riff on the hero of the now 25-year-old television show MacGyver, a scientific genius secret agent. He was a brainy, 'take action' kind of guy. MacGruber (Will Forte), on the other hand, is a world-class doofus who is somehow respected in the armed forces. With all of the evidence presented during the movie, it seems that the audience was duped into swallowing no small amount of second-rate garbage.

Austin Powers was more believable because its story was crafted to make everything fit the main character’s nature, like reverse engineering. He was called a suave swinger so all the women in those movies naturally fell under his charms. That’s how to make a good script for these kinds of stories. Only the hero can be out of synch with the world. It doesn’t make sense for the world to be out of synch as well. That’s too much for something directed towards an un-intellectual viewer.

The mullet-tastic MacGruber wears his checkered shirt and utility vest like he fits the bill but he’s more like an Inspector Gadget or Maxwell Smart. If he didn’t have competent people behind him then he would just end up tripping over himself, falling flat and being stepped on by the bad guys.

Speaking of which, here the villain is Dieter von Cunth (Val Kilmer), a wealthy and well-connected jerk who, for whatever reason, has stolen a nuclear warhead so that he can blow up Washington, D.C. The role of the villain is to be a foil, the guy who plays in opposition. He’s supposed to have all of the qualities that MacGruber doesn’t. We are meant to see MacGruber’s virtues in the light of this reflection. All we get is a view of how this bumbling idiot makes a mess of everything. He’s unwittingly foul and should also receive the enmity of celery producers for how he besmirched their product. From now on, my salads will have to do without.

Austin Powers might not have started on SNL but it managed to master what MacGruber is only fumbling at here, like a chef wearing oven mitts and trying to pick up a toothpick. It’s just grasping with occasionally jabs at unexpected brilliance. Overall, however, it just falls flat but the sparks make it seem like a little refinement can carry Forte’s comedy much farther, but hopefully not in the same direction as Powers star Mike Myers’ career. It’s probably a good omen for the future that Forte is starting off with something closer in quality to The Love Guru: it’s better to not strike gold on the first swing.

I wanted so much to dig this movie but I just can’t. I will say that the 1980s soundtrack kicked more butt than the star did. Whoever the music supervisor was did the best work out of anyone on this film.