We remain as delighted as we are perplexed that cameras have actually started rolling on the **MacGruber **movie, even though precious little news of the SNL sketch movie spinoff has surfaced beyond Bill Hader and Andy Samberg, both chums and former co-stars of director/screenwriter Jorma Taccone, telling Empire that the script is “really, really funny.”
Today though, New York magazine’s entertainment site Vulture had a few interesting quotes from SNL man Hader, wherein he details that the script reads like a ‘hard-R’, which leaves it open to all sorts of naughty opportunities. Of course, to those who haven’t read it (and that’s most of the world), that would sound like just another hurdle on the nearly impossible track of filling this gleefully one-note recurring sketch out to feature length, but Hader remains convinced that the idea will work.
“There’s a very definitive bad guy,” he says – that’d be Val Kilmer as the dastardly Cunth, then (permission to snigger). “The thing that kind of blew my mind about it though, is that it's like a hard-R movie. I was like ‘This is fucking ugly, are you guys really gonna do this?’ And they’re like ‘Yup.’”
If you’re not familiar with MacGruber, he’s a spoof of MacGyver, played by Will Forte, who makes “life-saving inventions out of household materials,” or would if he weren’t distracted every single time by some petty... well, distraction. If that doesn’t sound particularly hilarious, it’s probably because each sketch hinges on terrific comic timing – try and source some of the sketches on the web.
This is, to us, a hugely positive sign, possibly indicating a total expansion of the concept in the same way that John Landis and Dan Aykroyd were allowed to do with the only other R-rated SNL spinoff movie, The Blues Brothers. We shall be keeping a very close and eager eye on this.