MacGruber (2010)

MacGruber arrives in the cultural record as a 2010 action parody spun from a Saturday Night Live sketch, itself a send-up of MacGyver, and it conducts itself with a purity of purpose that borders on the archaeological. The film was shot in twenty-eight days in Albuquerque on a modest budget, and its ambitions extend no further than the faithful reproduction of 1980s and 1990s action cinema with a vulgar idiot installed at the center. Will Forte plays that idiot with commitment. The result is a movie that asks nothing of its audience beyond a tolerance for celery and for a license plate number repeated until it stops meaning anything.

The supporting cast is diverse in the unbothered manner of a casting director filling roles with whoever was funny or available. Maya Rudolph, Mark Henry, Dalip Singh, and a small delegation of professional wrestlers appear, and the film makes no comment on any of it. This is representation without a thesis, which is to say representation as it existed before anyone thought to keep score. A gay panic joke survives in the final cut, a relic its own star has since disavowed. That is not a theme. It is an embarrassment, and the distinction matters to the classification.

Elsewhere the film is a void. It has no interest in climate, capital, the body, the mind, or the historical record. Its protagonist is a narcissist and a fool, and the screenplay treats these as jokes, not as diagnoses. Nothing is explained to us. Nobody is scolded. For ninety minutes, a man urinates on a corpse from a cliff top, and the film considers the matter closed.