‘MacGruber’ – Neither ‘Superstar’ awful nor ‘Wayne’s World’ excellent

(Guest movie review by James Frazier)

The funniest joke in “MacGruber,” the latest attempt of a “Saturday Night Live” player to break into cinematic stardom, comes somewhere around the middle.

It’s a wordy, self-referential gag, rendered funnier because of its patience in reaching the punch line and the familiar voice reading the lines.

It’s an unexpectedly clever moment that stands out in a picture otherwise built on a litany of gags pulled straight from the screen comedy storehouse.

Curse words thicken the air with vulgarity, the ugliness of the male form lacerates our eyes, and action movie tropes are ridiculed so dutifully that the parodies themselves qualify as tropes.

Funny enough throughout to avoid the level of disaster as previous “SNL” nonsense such as “The Ladies’ Man” or “Superstar,” it lacks the mixture of both laughs and cleverness that all really good comedies possess.

Will Forte’s the titular MacGruber, a MacGyver clone with combat experience in every corner of the globe. General action parody aside, did the producers who signed the checks for this film ever stop to consider that men in their teens and twenties, certainly the best ticket buyers for a movie like this, might have a difficult time even remembering MacGyver, assuming they do at all?

That, more even than the gossamer thread of source material, make the existence of “MacGruber” borderline inexplicable.

Forte, a perfectly solid “SNL” actor, hasn’t the comedic depth to carry a movie on his shoulders. This will likely be his great effort before relegation to supporting work.

It’s only with the aid of stalwarts such as Val Kilmer, who plays the villainous Dieter von Cunth, and Powers Boothe, who shows up as MacGruber’s old commander, that the successful gags take off.

Kristen Wiig, for all intents and purposes the current star of “SNL,” plays Vicki St. Elmo, MacGruber’s love interest who has little to do other than to react to his hare-brained schemes, which largely involve dressing her up like him and hoping a game-winning distraction ensues.

Ryan Phillippe perhaps has the hardest job as MacGruber’s second-in-command and straight man, a task he performs more than admirably.

The plot, which concerns a MacGuffin that must be stopped at all costs, never enters any interesting territory, serving only to set up gags. Wouldn’t it have better for them to actually have MacGruber search for a weapon literally called a MacGuffin?

Something along the lines of director Edgar Wright’s “Hot Fuzz,” which wittily indulged in tropes as a way to effectively subvert and honor genre, would have served this film better.

Then again, the forces at work here aren’t as ambitious as Wright, and from the looks of it, not as clever or funny.

There’s little that’s not obvious or that puts an original spin on preexisting material, though it’s admirably efficient, and usually avoids gags that fail to detonate like one of MacGruber’s tennis ball grenades. Trouble is, all great comedy manages to be clever and funny at once, while the decent stuff usually only succeeds at one.

Better than failing at both, and there are certainly worse ways to extend an “SNL” skit.

(Photo: Ryan Phillippe, Will Forte and Kristen Wiig star in “MacGruber.”)

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