MOVIE REVIEWS: “MACGRUBER”

Judging by the reviews, the best thing MacGruber has going for it is its budget. It reportedly cost less than $10 million to make. Then again, if it performs as badly as It’s Pat, another movie inflated from a Saturday Night Live sketch, it could lose almost the whole ten mil. It’s Pat earned just over $60,000 during its entire run. Chances are Kyle Smith’s review of the movie in the New York Post is a lot funnier than the movie itself. Smith begins it this way: “There’s a reason you’ve never seen the words ‘Will Forte’ topping the billing of a major motion picture. After the throbbing flameball of unfunny that is MacGruber, you never will again. This mock actioner, based on the Saturday Night Live sketch spoofing the ’80s show MacGyver, is all about TV: It features the pacing of C-SPAN, the production values of the public-access channel, the writing acumen of Home Shopping Network. … How bad is this movie? So bad that critics weren’t allowed to see it until four hours before it opened.” Indeed, most reviews of the movie did not make Friday’s editions. Those that did rank high on the list of most excoriating reviews of the year. Rick Groen’s review in the Toronto Globe and Mail is headed: “MacGruber: It’s MacAwful.” Groen then describes the movie this way: “Think of a really bad, uncensored Saturday Night Live comedy sketch. Then make it worse — make it longer.” Across town, at the Toronto Star, Rob Salem finds himself in total accord. He calls the movie ” a jury-rigged patchwork creation, made up of lame repetitive gags and a lot of stuff we’ve seen done before and better in other movies.” In the New York Daily News, Joe Neumaier remarks that the movie “sure feels like it was put together with gum, shoelaces and a couple of sticky Twizzlers.” Robert Abele’s review in the Los Angeles Times did not appear in Friday’s print edition, but it did make the newspaper’s website. And it’s the only one appearing in the major newspapers that gives the movie passing grades. “While this jury-rigged exercise may not be an explosion of laughs,” Abele says, “it’s no dud, either.” In fact, he concludes, it’s “agreeably diverting.”