With 2010's Hilarious MacGruber, the Curious Phenomenon of Saturday Night Live Movies Ended on a High Note

It's throat-rippingly awesome!

What we think of as Saturday Night Live movies—opportunistic motion pictures based on popular recurring characters from Lorne Michaels’ deathless comic institution—was fundamentally a 1990s phenomenon. 

The zeitgeist-capturing, runaway success of 1992’s Wayne’s World led to 1993’s The Coneheads and Wayne’s World 2, 1994’s It’s Pat, 1995’s Stuart Saves His Family, 1998’s Stuart Saves His Family and A Night at the Roxbury, 1999’s Superstar and finally 2000’s The Ladies Man. 

That is a LOT of movies! And, to be brutally honest, they weren’t all great! Some were, in fact, quite poor. I’m not a huge fan of It’s Pat, for example. 

That’s nine movies in less than a decade. The only pure Saturday Night Live movies that were released before or after this period were 1980’s The Blues Brothers and 2010’s MacGruber. 

It is not a coincidence that The Blues Brothers, Wayne’s World and MacGruber are the three funniest and best films to emerge out of Saturday Night. In each case, the filmmaker, writer and stars had a vision beyond “Let’s crank out another SNL movie in order to keep the assembly line moving forward and the boss happy.” 

Dan Aykroyd had a vision for The Blues Brothers that was so big that co-screenwriter and director John Landis had to cut it in half to make a rollicking blockbuster that’s nevertheless one of the most joyously excessive comedies ever made. 

1992’s Wayne’s World was the first Saturday Night Live-derived comedy in twelve years. It was preceded only by the wildly dissimilar The Blues Brothers so it did not have a trusty template to follow. That was not true of the films that ensued but by the time 2000’s The Lady’s Man came out the SNL Movie factory had run out of steam. 

The next vehicle for a popular recurring character wouldn’t come until 2010’s MacGruber. The film was a feature-length vehicle for MacGruber, Will Forte’s pathologically cocky parody of Richard Dean Anderson’s MacGyver. 

Forte’s signature as a comic performer are men who have all the confidence in the world and next to nothing in the way of competence. That’s MacGruber. He’s a cocky bastard who always thinks he’s right, particularly when he is wrong. 

MacGruber was a glorious throwback to the Reagan era, when denim was king and mullets were the height of fashion. It parodied a show that hadn’t been on the air for eighteen years when MacGruber came out, aside from the occasional television movie. 

MacGruber is like an evil version of MacGyver who ostensibly works for the good guys but has an unfortunate habit of killing more of his men than his enemies. 

He’s MacGyver if MacGyver’s defining characteristic was not preternatural resourcefulness but rather being a raging asshole. Will Forte’s hilarious anti-hero is cheap. He’s narcissistic. He’s perpetually willing to put the lives of others on the line rather than risk injury or death himself. He’s so petty and ridiculous that when another driver is rude to him he makes it his life’s goal to punish him harshly for the most minor of transgressions. 

Like a lot of comic characters MacGruber’s intelligence and competence are elastic. They vary greatly from scene to scene. He is introduced, for example, as a uniquely qualified super-soldier, a John Rambo/Jason Bourne figure who has righteously murdered bad guys all over the world. 

In every subsequent scene MacGruber is less a righteous warrior than the world’s biggest idiot.

The film opens with an elaborate parody of Rambo III that finds MacGruber living a life of quiet and solitude in an Ecuadorian village when his mentor Jim Faith (Powers Boothe) tells him that his arch-nemesis Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer) has stolen a nuclear warhead. 

Director and co-writer Jorma Taccone, who created the character of MacGruber, and co-writer/star Will Forte conceived of MacGruber not as a goofy comic version of an action movie but rather as a straightforward throwback action movie from the 1980s/1990s with a funny lunatic at its center instead of a dashing man of action. 

MacGruber didn’t just get actors who would appear in the kinds of movies the film is riffing on; it got better actors. Powers Boothe, for example, is a better character actor and has a more commanding presence than the Rambo franchise’s Richard Crenna. Rambo would have been lucky to have Boothe. 

MacGruber is initially reluctant to return to his old, violent ways but he cannot resist an opportunity to get revenge on the man who murdered his wife (Maya Rudolph) on their wedding day. 

So he slips on working man’s denim and returns to a world he thought he’d left behind. 

But even MacGruber can’t do it alone. So there is a “getting the band back together” montage sequence of MacGruber reconnecting with old allies. Taccome nails the visual vocabulary of Jerry Bruckheimer-produced action movies but he also perfectly reproduces their tone of toxic, insecure, over-the-top macho. 

MacGruber’s connection to these men is ragingly homoerotic yet when he sees that one of the virile warriors he was hoping to recruit has a boyfriend he hastily crosses his name off a list of recruits for his new-old team. 

In a lesser movie this might qualify as a reactionary gay panic joke but the satirical target here is not a man who happens to be gay but rather a protagonist whose sexuality and masculinity are so fragile that he can’t handle the existence of homosexuality. 

Being gay ends up saving the man’s life because it means that he’s not in a van full of explosives that blow up due to MacGruber’s raging incompetence. The anti-hero/villain rounds up a Mission Impossible-style team just to kill them almost instantly. 

This re-establishes that MacGruber is very good at killing the good guys accidentally and very bad at killing bad guys. 

On Saturday Night Live MacGruber was an ostensible hero who failed pretty much every time because of his myriad inadequacies and shortcomings as a human being.

Having killed his team MacGruber is forced to look elsewhere for assistance. He tries to get Lieutenant Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillipe) to be part of his new team by weepingly offering to perform a wide variety of sexual favors for him. 

Absolutely nothing about the stern soldier suggests that he’s gay, let alone so sexually attracted to MacGruber that he could be bribed through oral sex or anal sex or any other kind of sex. 

This is another instance where paying it deadpan yields huge dividends. Phillipe’s straight arrow looks at MacGruber with a look that combines confusion with disgust and pity. 

There’s a wonderful payoff to this scene late in the film when MacGruber is once again at a nadir personally and professionally and he tries to get out of a jam by weepingly offering sexual favors to someone who clearly does not want them. 

Only this time it’s Powers Boothe’s Colonel Jim Faith. The scene would have been infinitely less funny with someone like Leslie Nielsen playing the older mentor role. It’s hilarious because Booth plays it dramatically. His response is the same as Lieutenant Dixon Piper but you can also see him trying and failing to reconcile the super-efficient MacGruber he remembers fondly with the sad, whimpering man-baby offering to suck his dick, or let him suck his dick, and various other offers that he could not be less interested in. 

I hope that in the Memorial Reel for the 2018 Academy Awards Boothe’s impressive life and career were represented by a clip of him looking on with horror and pity as MacGruber offers to blow him. 

The other member of MacGruber’s team is Vicki St. Elmo (Kristin Wiig). Vicki St. Elmo is the 1980s in human form. If a Lisa Frank sticker album was sentient it would be Vicki St. Elmo, who writes synth pop ballads about love when she’s not helping save the world. 

For reasons no one can quite figure out Vicki St. Elmo is sexually attracted to MacGruber despite his unfortunate predilection for almost getting her killed. 

MacGruber is such a cowardly narcissist that he has other members of his team dress up like him, ostensibly as a distraction but really because he seems to get off on it sexually and would prefer it if the bad guys killed someone who was merely dressed like MacGruber rather than MacGruber himself. 

MacGruber is full of inspired running gags that only get funnier with repetition. I vividly remembered, for example, MacGruber diligently taking out his car stereo every time he leaves his automobile but I didn’t recall that he continues to carry it around even after it has been broken. 

It’s hilarious in itself but it’s also very true to MacGruber’s character. He is a hopeless cheapskate who would much rather risk torture and death for his allies rather than pay for parking. 

That’s the genius of MacGruber; it feels more like a Jorma Taccone/Will Forte movie than a Saturday Night Live movie. MacGruber was unlike any Saturday Night Live movies that came before it. It’s filthier, more violent and crazier on a conceptual level. It’s not just R-rated; it’s a hard R full of throat ripping and dudes who are naked except for a celery stalk in their behinds.  

MacGruber is so funny that I’ll sometimes think about a specific running gag and start laughing long and hard at it. MacGruber is so explosively hilarious that I don’t even need to be watching it for it make me chuckle. 

If MacGruber is the final Saturday Night Live movie then they at least went out on top. With 1980’s The Blues Brothers, Saturday Night Live movies started out strong and ended thirty years later with another winner. In between were a series of films that are generally far better and more compelling than their dodgy reputations would suggest.