Altogether now: “MacGruber! Making life-saving inventions out of household materials! MacGruber! He’s a great SNL sketch and he’s about to become a movie! MacGruber! The guy’s a frickin’ genius – MacGruber!”
It’s been frankly ages since a Saturday Night Live character – repeat, character; not actor – made the big break onto the big screen. But Paramount and Relativity Media are about to roll the dice on MacGruber, a feature-length version of the hilarious Will Forte sketches that have been one of the show’s biggest weapons over the past few years.
Essentially demented parodies of MacGyver, each sketch – when they do appear, they come in threes on the show – sees MacGruber, a go-getting, bemulleted action hero, locked in a room with two of his colleagues (one of whom is that week’s celebrity host) while a bomb counts down to zero. MacGruber’s attempts to fix the bomb using anything lying around are always waylaid by a combination of incompetence and his massive ego, with the bomb always going off mid-sentence.
Sounds formulaic, and you’d be right. But Forte, who co-writes the skits with The Lonely Island’s Jorma Taccone, who also directs, has kept the joke alive brilliantly, introducing an increasingly tortured back-story for MacGruber (he’s an alcoholic financial failure with daddy issues, a gay son… and he can shoot ping pong balls out of his butt).
Of course, the sketch premise won’t stretch out to a full-length film, so Forte and Taccone – who’s also directing the movie – have gone for a plot that sounds like a parody of Rambo, Commando and even The Expendables. It will see MacGruber, a long-retired super-soldier now in peaceful exile as a monk, called back into action for one last mission, to take down an evil arms dealer, called Cunth. Yes, Cunth.
And even though that would seem to be as sophisticated as this is going to get, we still can’t wait for this. Forte has long been one of SNL’s secret weapons, and it’s good to see Taccone – who co-starred in the criminally underrated Hot Rod and Land Of The Lost – getting his shot behind the camera on a movie that, given that it starts shooting next month, will surely beat the MacGyver movie into cinemas.
Oh, and just to compound matters, Ryan Phillippe and Val Kilmer are in talks to join the cast. Phillippe, who’ll relish the opportunity to poke fun at his super-serious image, will play a soldier who teams up with MacGruber, while Kilmer will play the utter Cunth. And walking comedy goddess, Kristen Wiig, will also appear in the film, presumably as MacGruber’s hapless assistant-cum-love interest.
Amazing. We’ll start queuing just as soon as we’ve disarmed this bomb. Quick – someone hand us that paper clip. You, fetch that complete collection of Empire Australia. And you, bring us that -