
No comic explosion, but not quite a dud, no Wayne's World, but not The Ladies Man either, Mac Gruber does manage to pull off the seemingly impossible mission of expanding a 90-second one-joke Saturday Night Live sketch into a feature film. What's next: " Toonces the Cat Who Could Drive a Car"? In those Mac Gruber sketches, Will Forte's mullet-manned hero "makes life-saving inventions out of household materials" but always gets sidetracked as the bomb he's defusing ticks down to its last 20 seconds. Blown up for the big screen, Mac Gruber finds a bigger payoff whenever the film sidetracks from the standard-issue '80s action movie plot, as witness Mac Gruber's deranged revenge fantasies toward a driver who hurled a drive-by insult at his car. Mac Gruber's secret weapon is Val Kilmer as a megalomaniacal villain (his name, not appropriate for a family website, is a profanely puerile running joke) with a stolen Russian nuclear warhead & a grudge against Mac Gruber. Mac Gruber's somewhat less than A-team
Includes:: Vicki St. Elmo (SNL MVP Kristin Wiig), more into her music than into saving the world, & straight arrow Lieutenant Piper (Ryan Phillippe), who begins to question Mac Gruber's unorthodox tactics (one involving a diversionary stalk of celery is just one of the film's more jaw-dropping gross-out gags). Mac Gruber may not set the world on fire, but the insanely committed Forte, like Mac Gruber, will do anything, no matter how obscene, to complete his mission. Mission pretty much accomplished, particularly in a sex scene that is the most outrageous of its kind since Team America: World Police (albeit, thankfully, not as graphic).