The Dissolve is doing their Movie of the Week on MacGruber, a 2010 SNL movie that I watched maybe half of a year ago before turning it off. It’s got a reputation for being divisive, but many people I follow in the comedy world hold it in high regard. The movie is less revered in the film community, but has always seemed ripe for cult status, as all SNL movies can be. Finding out where you land on such a film is fun in and of itself, so after finally watching the whole thing, I can say the appeal of MacGruber makes a lot more sense to me.

Sad as it sounds, something like Sharknado is the closest thing we have to a classic ZAZ parody like Airplane! or The Naked Gun. Not in terms of quality, mind you, but because it’s an effects-driven parody for an effects-driven market. Flight disaster films and cop movies were prime targets for parody in the ‘80s because they were genres that had many different entries to draw material from, and could be easily mimicked. With superhero movies and city-scale destruction now being the norm for action movies, the dominant public entertainment in film in desperate need of a good pantsing has become too big to mock.

Where the Meet the Spartans and Epic Movies of the world are just bad pop culture sketches strung together, the best parody films satirize a genre’s form, as well as its content. Blazing Saddles and Spaceballs are as much homage as they are funhouse mirror to their source material. The truest parody asks that you look the part before you open your mouth. But how do you silly walk the walk of a colossal blockbuster, when so much of their content is pretty visual effects, and the story is often secondary to setpiece placement?

Anyway, MacGruber is pretty hit and miss as a comedy, par for the course for any SNL film, but as a parody of shows like its TV namesake, as well as ‘80s action films, it’s a terrific success. The SNL digital shorts became properly, in part, because their production values allowed them to recall the formal qualities of whatever they mocked, be it music video, or action scene. MacGruber successfully trades on the camera intensity and high key lighting of post Tony Scott-Hollywood, while also having a cheapness that makes it look like an episode of TV.

The movie, structurally, is also a mutt. Most individual scenes are little more than sketches, the premise being “how badly can MacGruber screw things up?” But the punchline often determines where it is the plot will head next. Like MacGruber himself, the film rushes headlong at a joke, and through dumb luck and persistence, somehow makes it work. The movie employs its titular hero like a rubber band, stretching his actions from goofy, to careless, to disgusting or despicable, but once it hits the vein of laugh it’s been working toward, MacGruber contracts back to being a movie again, ready to repeat the whole process at whichever next plot point has been established.  

MacGruber and MacGruber are the product of guys raised on ‘80s action heroes; they can effectively satirize the horrible one-liners, violence, and hair of guys from Rambo, to Maverick, to Riggs, but they love the blissful stupidity of these guys all the same. The nostalgia that lets director Jorma Taccone and company know their targets so well is also what lets their more immature instincts get the better of them a lot of the time. These are comedians working in the 21st century, so MacGruber was inevitably going to be more scatological and filthy than any of its ‘80s, or TV inspirations.

But that also means MacGruber’s creators are old enough to appreciate the storytelling tropes worth goofing on in action movies, and use those to give their parody a form. This is ultimately what allows MacGruber to have its lasting appeal. The Seltzer-Friedberg era of parody may be as much a product of choosing structurally weak source material as it is S & F’s awful writing. Guardians of the Galaxy and Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles are going to be the two biggest movies this weekend, but how would you satirize a film that’s all about having a good time while chasing a McGuffin, or one that already plays like an imitation of Transformers? I guess my real question after watching MacGruber is: are we making anything worth celebrating through satire anymore?