There’s a reason you’ve never seen the words “Will Forte” topping the billing of a major motion picture. After the throbbing flameball of unfunny that is “MacGruber,” you never will again.
This mock actioner, based on the “Saturday Night Live” sketch spoofing the ’80s show “MacGyver,” is all about TV: It features the pacing of C-SPAN, the production values of the public-access channel, the writing acumen of Home Shopping Network.
The chief joke is that the bad guy is named “Cunth.”
How bad is this movie? So bad that critics weren’t allowed to see it until four hours before it opened. So bad that to play the villain it was forced to hire the lumpy, inert remnants of what used to be Val Kilmer.
Forte’s MacGruber — Stallone meets Clouseau — is a military macho man in a Jon Bon Jovi shag pulled out of retirement by a colonel (Powers Boothe) who needs him to track down the evil Cunth, who years ago killed MacGruber’s wife and recently stole a nuclear weapon he plans to use to kill the president.
It’s unclear who that president may be: Though everyone is styled like the ’80s and there’s a giant picture of Reagan on the colonel’s wall, everyone also has up-to-the-minute cellphones.
It’s also unclear who the main character is: For two-thirds of the movie, MacGruber annoys his partners — a young soldier (Ryan Phillippe) and his wife’s best friend (Kristen Wiig) — by being a stooge and a coward who bungles every detail.
Yet suddenly in the last act, for no reason, he becomes an expert assassin who knows how to disable a nuclear missile. Unlike the arrogant but essentially childlike Clouseau, MacGruber never makes you root for him nor says anything funny.
His jerky remarks wouldn’t draw a laugh in the average middle-school boys locker room: “Did I remember to tell you how ugly I think you are?”
“If you think he’s so handsome, why don’t you marry him?”
He’s not a likable oaf but a loathsome creep who does things that aren’t amusing over and over (like playing Big ’80s power ballads on his car stereo, then removing it from the dashboard).
“MacGruber” never comes close to making even a mildly satiric point — at the expense of, for instance, the patriotic mid-’80s American he-man flick — because it’s so focused on silly clothes and butt jokes.
Forte prances naked except for a celery stalk sticking out of his hindquarters, a gag so pathetic that you neither laugh with him nor laugh at him. You just want to give his mom a hug.
Later in the movie, Phillippe’s character is asked to do the same thing — but Phillippe obviously refused, because the movie awkwardly cuts to a body double.
Can’t-miss opportunities are missed: a montage sequence about assembling tough guys for the team doesn’t contain a joke — except that one of the guys is gay.
“MacGruber” even wastes the reason for its existence — the readily spoofable MacGyver trademark of manufacturing lifesaving gizmos out of household items. Almost an hour into the movie, MacGruber is shown rounding up some bric-a-brac and then — nothing.
“I don’t know what I’m doing, and everybody hates me,” cries our hero, in the most accurate line of the movie.
Comedy just isn’t his Forte.