Monday, January 24, 2011

MacGruber

Rejected from the toilet bowl and then re-submerged for an attempted reflush, Jorma Taccone's MacGruber salivates and regurgitates its lewd, moronic humour in an occasionally funny ridiculous big penis joke. Starting slow and then slowly improving, if you happen to find it endearing when a bad joke doesn't work and then the writers try it again anyways, making light of the fact that it didn't work the first time with each subsequent rehashing, MacGruber keeps plugging away with charmingly impotent precision and blunt extreme distaste. A nuclear warhead has been hijacked by a politically connected thug who hopes to use it to blow up Washington, D.C. The only person who can stop him used to be an exceptional counter-terrorism operative who retired after his wife was killed during their wedding. Convinced by Col. James Faith (Powers Boothe) to come back for one more round, MacGruber (Will Forte) returns from Ecuador to put a unit together to recover the warhead. But after accidentally blowing that unit up with homemade C-4, he has to do his best with everything he's got, which, as it turns out, is much more competent than he is.

Borrowing heavily from Live Free or Die Hard, Austin Powers and Team America World Police, MacGruber situates a blast from the past within the present and then forces those familiar with contemporary dynamics to follow his antiquated guidance. Frustrated and confused while not shying away from consistently augmenting their criticisms, MacGruber's new team does their best to deal with his chauvinistic narcissistic improvisations. As the plot unravels, it turns out that just about everyone can be considered one big happy family, cohesively united through scatological sentiments, an important characteristic of this type of comedy's aesthetic. The film does improve as it progresses, mostly due to its intelligent stupidity and the ways in which it champions new members of the workforce, but if you don't like narratives where each consecutive piece of smutty dialogue becomes more and more lascivious as time goes by, there's more than a slight chance you will not like MacGruber.

Note that I watched the unrated version.

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