What in the name of John Belushi's Spinning Corpse made some one think that adapting the Saturday Night Live sketch, MacGruber, into a full length feature was a good idea? If you're not familiar with the concept, it's basically a spoof of long running 80's actionfest MacGuyver...a show that was so dumb it really didn't need anyone taking the piss out of it in the first place.
Will Forte stars as the title character, a Frank Drebin/Inspector Clouseau wannabe, who bumbles incompetently through his mission of nation importance, and succeeds, despite his over-confidence. So far so bad. But it's worse than that as pretty much nothing works. The director can't judge comic timing in the slightest meaning this so called comedy is virtually laugh free. Still, to be fair, he is working with a script that has very little amusing in it and a cast that's mainly playing it straight (Val Kilmer, Powers Booth and Ryan Phillippe)...or in Forte's case, playing comedy very very badly. Too much time has been spent making this low budget movie look like a gritty action movie rather than composing the shots and editing the scenes so they'll be funny. MacGruber is nice to look at but abysmal as a work of humour.
Kristen Wigg is the only performer in the piece that understands comic delivery and there's only a couple of gags in the entire film that raise a chuckle. Number one is the fact the baddie Val Kilmer is called Cunth (that joke will never get old) and the description of what MacGruber calls an upper decker (shitting in the cistern rather than the bowl). Otherwise it's 80's themed gags and MacGuyver references fall completely flat. Avoid.
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