MacGruber (15) **
Running time: 90 mins
The A-Team hasn’t even opened, and already it has much to answer for. By way of pre-Hannibal spoilers, the summer has so far brought us the threadbare The Losers and now this throwaway spoof, which labours the obvious point that 80s TV action serials weren’t especially credible. Saturday Night Live’s Will Forte - whose 2007 vehicle The Brothers Solomon sunk without trace over here - plays the eponymous explosives-loving dimwit, a bemulleted Richard Dean Anderson-alike pulled from early retirement in a small Ecuadorian village to once again face his nemesis: one Dieter van Cunth (Val Kilmer, joining The Losers’ Jason Patric among the ranks of former leading men resigning themselves to jowly villainy), who murdered MacGruber’s bride on her wedding day, and is now threatening Western civilisation with a nuclear warhead.
Director Jorma Taccone has the generic dialogue, warehouse shootouts and misty Tony Scott lighting down pat, yet as his antagonist’s surname suggests, few of the gags venture much above waist height: frankly, you may just not need to see Forte inserting celery in his rear to distract Kilmer’s goons, or love interest Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) removing bullets from the MacGruber crotch. A modest handful of chuckles may make MacGruber more appealing as a DVD option - it’s hard to take too harshly against a hero whose first act back on the job is to retune his car stereo to Toto’s “Rosanna” - but these are game-changing times for American comedy, and this here’s the C-team at work.
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