IHAO on ... MacGruber

MacGruber is awful.  And I don't mean a bad quality, poorly made movie kind of way.  I mean in a lowest, grossest, most despicable "humor" in place of real comedy.  This is a movie that thinks that cursing is a punchline.  There were a total of two jokes the didn't involve cursing in this whole movie, and they were both the only funny jokes.  Bah.  I don't even want to write about this.  I should be writing my big ole wrestling article for this weekend.  But nope, I had to go and waste my money and my time buying this piece of garbage.

You see, I listen to and watch a lot of things to be able to find interesting films to talk about.  And for about two months, I kept hearing these little remarks about how underrated MacGruber is from comedians and critics that I like.  So I was looking around on Amazon, say it was pretty darn cheap for a blu-ray at 8.88, and I decided to order it.  I got the movie on the 23rd and put it in my blu-ray player.  The movie did not finish until the 26th, when I finally stumbled my way through the whole thing.  The whole 96 minutes.  96 minutes?  That's it?!  I have never felt like I wasted more of my time and money than I have on this movie.

MacGruber is a "parody" of 80s action tropes and the television show MacGyver.  It was a sketch on SNL, and it got made into an SNL film.  You know what, that should have been my warning right there.  I can count on two fingers the number of good SNL movies there are.  So you take an SNL sketch, put the least talented, least funny member of the Lonely Island/Digital Shorts crew to write and direct it, and money!  Well, not really, because there is karma in the world and sometimes crappy movies in fact do crappily, seeing as MacGruber never made back its budget.

Pictured above: Expression of a talentless comedian thinking "Haters gonna hate."

The plot is that a bad guy with a curse word last name (played by Val Kilmer) stole a nuclear warhead, and the US government gets MacGruber out of self-imposed retirement after the same bad guy murdered MacGruber's wife on the wedding day.  MacGruber gets a team together, kills them, gets a second team together, is one of the worst human beings ever put to film, constantly mugs and curses and is a huge ole homophobe for jokes, has sex with a hallucination of his dead wife after having sex with Kristin Wiig's character, doesn't actually know how to disarm the bad guys bomb, but the day is saved anyway because it is.

I hated this movie.  And I didn't from the beginning.  But there is a scene that ... ok, hold up, let me talk good things.  The film looks way better than it needs to.  It looks like a Michael Bay action flick, which is way too good for this movie.  Also, there are two good jokes.  One involves a montage of getting "the gang back together" of MacGruber recruiting a bunch of wrestlers and them doing the bicep hand-slap from Predator in different variations.

The second joke is MacGruber talking with the milquetoast no-character Ryan Phillipe and as he argues that Wiig's character has no feelings for him, he says "You're loco, man" to whit there is a subtitle that comes up and says "You're crazy, man."  Subtitle joke was funny.  The way the wrestlers were introduced in classic 80s style was funny.  Nothing else.  Literally nothing else was funny.  Even worse, nothing else was clever.  This movie takes every setup and always subverts it with something vulgar.

Here, here's an example of this that makes me just the angriest.  The entire movie, the whole time, MacGruber constantly tells bad guy that he is going to cut of the bad guy's penis and make him suck it.  He says that maybe 25 times over the course of the movie.  So in the post-climax, when the bad guy returns, MacGruber beats him up, says his non-pun catchphrase (which is also a "running joke" where he is just vulgar and curses at the guy he is about to kill) and then tries to cut it off.  But, subversion of the joke time, the bad guy's penis was blown up in the explosion from the climax, so he doesn't have one!  And we get a close up of his non-penis!  FUNNY RIGHT?

Please laugh!

This movie is irredeemably bad.  It is the only movie I have regretted buying since I started doing these reviews.  There isn't a single thing redeeming about it.  It is better than Get Him To the Greek, which is equally filled with vulgarity as a replacement for jokes, but at least that movie had small scenes where you see the Aldous Snow character have some of the heart he did when Jason Segal wrote him.  There isn't an ounce of redeeming quality in this "comedy."  Even the well-shot cinematography ends up just grating and absolutely not working, and even worse, when the cinematography is bad, like a terrible falling sequence with the bad guy after the no-penis reveal I mentioned above, it just makes the good cinematography look WORSE because it is so out of place.  Maybe, MAYBE if the film was actually shot like an 80s film, MAYBE that would help.  But nope, it is shot like a modern day action film, and it thinks it is clever to take all these MacGyver tropes like the hair and the gadgets and the no guns thing and just pointing out how lame and stupid they are!  That's what makes it funny!  Cursing all the time and being random and being the worst human being ever put to film.  ARG!

Grade: F---