MacGruber

The natural reaction to learning that Hollywood was making a feature-length film based on the recurring "Saturday Night Live" mini-sketches revolving around inept wannabe good guy MacGruber would be a word that itself forms the basis for a regular "SNL" feature; that word being, "Really?" The two-minute (or so) bits featuring a vainglorious send-up of the amiable, mullet-headed '80s television favorite "MacGyver," here a would-be explosives expert and impromptu alchemist of household objects who reveals not just a major lack of core competency but also some mortifying character flaw/quirk before pathetically failing to save the day (each skit ends with an image of a big structure exploding big time), can be pretty damn funny. And wide-eyed Will Forte, who plays the character, is a whiz at conveying a rib-tickling cretinous arrogance. But even the most high-concept besotted Hollywood executive might rationally conclude that the premise is too thin to support an actual motion picture. (Thinner even, indeed, than the conceit that drove a prior poorly-fated "SNL" movie, the ill-remembered "A Night at the Roxbury.")

Well, surprise. While retaining the premise's surface goofiness and upping the nastiness and vulgarity to near toxic levels, "MacGruber" the movie manages to succeed not just as a laser-sharp parody of all stripes of cliché-laden action blockbusters, but as a consistently hilarious bad taste farce. Co-written by Forte and fellow "SNL" writers John Solomon and Jorma Taccone, the movie kicks off by acknowledging how absurd the idea of a "MacGruber" movie is, with an adaptation of the TV sketch's uber-cheesy but tossed-off theme song, here sung by a very slick choir that intones, "He made a f---ing movie, MacGruber!"

The opening, in which a nuclear missile is hijacked by a gang of grisly baddies led by a very pudgy Val Kilmer (whose character is named Dieter von Cunth, just to give you a relative idea of the subtlety of some of the humor here), is played almost 100 percent straight, with convincing violence and gore, long shots distorted by desert heat, views of black-clad men walking four abreast toward the camera in slow-motion, and so on. Director Taccone does what Jay Roach never managed in the "Austin Powers" movies: He visually nails the genre, and not just in the obvious ways.

After the opening, some exposition on the legendary MacGruber is provided by a colonel who's taking an eager young soldier out to an exotic locale to re-recruit the now in-hiding agent, and the way the camera cranes in to the military man's face as he intones the big reveal of the dialogue exchange ("Because he's been dead for 10 years") is just spot on. One of the most bracing things about this spoof is that, while it was clearly made by guys who on some level enjoy movies in which stuff blows up, it's not inordinately affectionate toward the genre; the filmmakers seem to have an acute awareness that the sort of portentous conventions they're mocking have never not been ridiculous, that such tropes were silly even when they were fresh.

The key to making such stuff funny, for the actors at least, is keeping a straight face. Action movie veteran Powers Boothe and buff-young-intense-guy Ryan Phillippe do an exemplary job in this respect, as the colonel and his MacGruber-worshipping (at least he worships MacGruber at first) subordinate.

As for Forte himself, he displays an incredible willingness to explore every uncomfortable place that his character goes here. And boy, are they uncomfortable. Given the relative expansiveness of the feature-film format, MacGruber has a lot of time to display not just his free-floating hostility (his tirades when Phillippe's character innocuously requests to join his team are delightful miniatures of derangement), but also his obsessive anger, as when a perceived slight in a parking snafu leads to an all-work-and-no-play-makes-Jack-a-dull-(and worse)-boy episode that provides one of the film's more engaging leitmotifs. And then there's the character's penchant for offering gay sex as a means of apology, and doing things with a celery stalk that never ought to be done. Forte attacks all of this with a relish that sometimes is, well, unseemly, which is the whole point. As his chipper, bad-musically-inclined cohort and potential love interest, fellow "SNL" cast member Kristen Wiig follows Forte into the realms of utter ick with better than due diligence. Their inevitable coupling is so grotesquely, hilariously wrong that it actually manages to evoke the early work of John Waters.

There's nothing in "MacGruber" that's as genuinely subversive as that stuff. But it's still surprising, bracing, and welcome to see a Hollywood comedy that doesn't bother to back off from its own justifiable mean streak.

Glenn Kenny is a writer living in Brooklyn. He was the chief film critic for Premiere magazine from 1998 to 2007. He contributes to various publications and Web sites, and blogs at http://somecamerunning.typepad.com.