5-27-10 Movie Review: MacGruber

Jim Erickson was surprised by this movie, and not in a good way. Get used to it: the Al Fresco movies by Tallgrass and the Murdock movies and the Orpheum Third Thursday movies are all scheduled for the same nights. This being the fourth Thursday of May, we have only Al Fresco and Murdock competing with each other, but considering what the commercial operations are offering, that’s unfortunate enough. Tonight, the Murdock at 536 North Broadway, at 7:30, continues its summer superromances with Christopher Reeve somehow pushing himself backward in time, in 1980’s Somewhere in Time to woo Jane Seymour on Mackinac Island, with such top talent as Christopher Plummer, Teresa Wright, and William H. Macy in support. And at 8, over at the Brickyard, 129 North Rock Island, six-Oscar winner Chicago, the musical with Renee Zellweger, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Queen Latifah, and Richard Gere will show, with kitchen opening at 7 and a short subject before the feature.

And come Tuesday, the League of Women Voters starts a rather ambitious series of video-and-discussion shows with the Public Broadcasting award winner One Woman, One Vote, about the women’s suffrage movement, at the Downtown Senior Center, one block south of Douglas and one block east of Seneca, at 6:30 to 8:30. That’s 6:30 Tuesday, Downtown Senior Center, 200 South Walnut – which must have been considered downtown at some time or other. One block south of Douglas, one east of Seneca.

Or you COULD go see MacGruber; I wouldn’t stop you. But be it on your head if you do.

I have to give MacGruber one big surprise: I did not expect, this summer to see a movie worse than Kick-Ass.

But Kick-Ass had at least the germ of a new idea in the efforts of a powerless adolescent and an even less supernatural preteener to be costumed crime fighters; it had no idea what to do with them, but it did have the idea. MacGruber has nothing whatever.

It apparently was intended to be some kind of parody of superhero comics, like Kick-Ass, though based, I guess, on television’s The A-Team and the movies’ Dirty Dozen and their innumerable ilk starring Dolph Lundgren and Chuck Norris and THEIR ilk. But even rubbish like that requires some kind of humor, or at least high spirits, and imaginative action; and even such as Lundgren and Norris are Lord Lawrence Oliviers compared to Will Forte, who isn’t funny even when he resorts to total nudity with a flower protruding behind, and who generally exudes all the charm and drama of an adolescent narcissist with tantrums. Even people who have in other places shown real ability, like Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillipe and Powers Booth and Maya Rudolph and Val Kilmer, can do nothing with a script compiled by the office boy and directed by the sanitation man. Every bad joke deserves another try, and imitations of other movies are assumed to be hilarious by their very obviousness, while you hear witty dialogue like, “I got him just where I want him.” “I think it’s the other way around.” Who just needs Saturday Night Live when you’ve got snappy repartee like that?

One thing MacGruber will do for you: it’s enable you to face the rest of this dreadful summer with courage, knowing you’ve endured the worst.