MacGruber
Letterboxd has an ingenious concept baked into its rating system. You can rate a film on a scale of zero to four stars, and you can also adorn a film with a heart. These two things are completely separate systems. The films you love and the films you thought were great are by default a decoupled set.
This is one of many decisions that makes Letterboxd a fascinating and well-designed piece of software, because I have no idea how to rate MacGruber, which strains the conceit of a single numerical score. And I don't mean this only in the same way it can be said of all comedic films. Obviously it is harder to discuss the positive and negative qualities of comedy as opposed to drama, because subjective tastes become even more subjective.
But very specifically, my reaction upon watching MacGruber — a film during which I laughed out loud more than any other film this year — was some combination of "that was a piece of shit" and "I wonder if these five people have seen this, because I bet they'll love it."
MacGruber does not satisfactorily answer the most important question an SNL film must answer, which is: why does this need to exist at all? You could, again, say this of any work of art, but SNL films are all of a kind — sequels to sketches whose idea was already hyper-optimized for a medium much, much shorter than ninety minutes.
One answer might be this: the writers The credited writers are Forte and two SNL writers, which I would surmise is metonymy for "the SNL writer's room." had a handful of ideas stuck in their heads that would otherwise not come out. In the process of building a low-quality movie, they spilled those ideas, and it turns out some of them are extremely funny. Another answer might be that you give the late, great Val Kilmer and, of all people, Ryan Phillippe a chance to play opposite a character who — in a film or in a skit — is so loud that others do not have the budget or the time to do anything except react in a quick reaction shot. (Both, of course, are true yet insufficient.)
And the film feels, quite vividly, like a college dorm room filled with jokes and half-jokes being hurled like careless javelins. This is a connection I draw with no bias, even though it was released in 2010 while I was an undergrad. There are lots of jokes about dicks and balls. The repetition of these jokes itself becomes a joke, and it lets you briefly — for a fraction of a second — pretend that it is elevated material. If you don't like a joke, don't worry: another one of varying quality is coming five seconds later.
What else is there to say? This is not, to be clear, elevated material. But I can't imagine a better version of MacGruber than what we got. And the one we got made me laugh a bunch. Not just for obscenity's sake — because in the midst of the detritus, there was some really good material. Truth be told, I am not that much of a Will Forte fan. I would consider myself more of a Jason Sudeikis guy. But his comedy — and, as getfiscal puts it, "pure energy" — evokes in everyone he plays opposite who isn't from SNL Wiig really doesn't do it for me here, with a brief exception of her disgruntled face at the prospect of having to pretend to play the titular character. a certain blessed mania.