MacGruber Season 1 is now streaming on Peacock.
Sometimes, a groundswell of support can take as little as two days to keep a fan favorite going. Sometimes, it takes 11 years… but here we are: MacGruber is back. Though its perplexing Rotten Tomatoes score may fool you, the 2011 movie based on the Saturday Night Live sketch is a cult favorite (and favorite of Christopher Nolan’s) for a reason. Lots of reasons actually, and MacGruber’s sequel series now streaming on Peacock doesn’t forget one of them. Though MacGruber’s return walks up to the line of overstaying its welcome, when the show hits, it hits hard. Led by Will Forte, displaying an unwavering commitment to being the lowest-status character on the show, MacGruber is ludicrous, stupid, and occassionally misguided, but a damn funny follow-up to his first outing.
MacGruber’s spent the last ten years in jail for one of the hundreds of crimes he committed in his movie, but finally gets released by General Fasoose (Laurence Fishburne) to take down bio-terrorist Enos Queeth (Billy Zane), with whom the Grubes has a longstanding blood feud. MacGruber is rarely at his best working alone, but his old partners Vicky St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) and Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) have settled down into married life and have little appetite for Mac’s renegade ways… at least at first.
With the creative team of Jorma Taccone (The Lonely Island), Forte (The Last Man on Earth), and John Solomon (Saturday Night Live) returning, you can forget any concerns about MacGruber’s bawdy humor and anachronistic style being lost in the translation to short-form. From the first ripping guitar riff that blares when Mac walks into frame, to the second, to the third, fourth… you get it; MacGruber gets hold of a joke, runs it into the ground until it’s not funny, then keeps going until it’s funny again. These running gags are the backbone of MacGruber, which makes sense given its history as a recurring SNL sketch, and are deployed with a gleeful and reckless abandon. The amount of mileage this show gets out of a misplaced tiger roar sound effect will stagger you, a worthy equal to Wet Hot American Summer’s pot-smashing sound used pretty much any time an object is thrown offscreen. But for as audacious as the dialogue and litany of one-liners are, you’ll find just as much joy in MacGruber’s finer details. I’ll point out that Episode 5 features an Emmy winner.
There’s no MacGruber without Forte, and his performance here is stronger than ever. Forte has wanted to get back under the mullet for a long time now, and that enthusiasm shines through on screen. He guides MacGruber through mood swing after mood swing -- full of swagger one second, groveling and begging for degradation the next -- and always feels in command of how what he’s doing will come across. For as narcissistic as MacGruber himself is, Forte’s ego is nowhere to be found: he practically lays down and lets the show walk over him to get laughs and it’s consistently funny to see such a sad sack also be such a savage murderer. MacGruber kills, he kills often, and he kills creatively.
It won’t surprise you that Forte doesn’t miss a step as MacGruber, but what may is how much better an actor Forte has become since shooting the movie. Having watched the movie directly before the series, Forte’s ability to find nuances in his unhinged performance is one of MacGruber’s more pleasant surprises. It’s when MacGruber’s at his most desperate that Forte finds a way to let just enough genuine heart into his performance to keep you on his side, which, given how much of a dirtbag he can be, isn’t always easy. Make no mistake: the only tears you will cry watching this show will be from laughter, but Forte manages to straddle a very fine line between over-the-top and genuine, and never at the expense of a joke. Of all the ‘80s relics that MacGruber maintains, his misogyny and dismissiveness of his ex-wife Vicky St. Elmo does grate before long, and though the writers fumble their way towards teaching him a lesson there, it doesn’t feel earned.
Vicky St. Elmo is written as parody, a fawning assistant to MacGruber’s badass operative. Wiig elevates the character, who finds her confidence as she goes. Her tendency to riff the ends of her sentences is an oldie, but goodie, and the subplot of her impersonating a target whose accent she very much cannot do gives Wiig an extended chance to flex her character-building muscles.
Phillippe’s Dixon Piper doesn’t leave as much of an impression as he did when we first met him in 2011. The writing doesn’t give Phillippe much opportunity to work against Piper’s gruff, dismissive demeanor, so the character’s not as reliably fun. It’s a problem that recurs with other supporting characters. General Fasoose takes over the role of MacGruber’s military liaison, and Fishburne shows up ready to clown the hell around. For as hilarious as Fishburne is in the throes of passion or catching a whiff of MacGruber he doesn’t like, Fasoose spends a little too much time playing the upstanding military man throughout the season. Fishburne’s comedic chops are criminally underused outside of this show, so it was disappointing to see MacGruber make the same mistake. Zane’s Enos Queeth presents rather flatly, with little time devoted to giving Queeth any kind of defining traits of his own, other than a boring revenge motivation.
MacGruber’s best episodes are its first and last. The premiere functions well as a standalone mission and in how it reasserts MacGruber’s absurd tone, wasting absolutely no time putting a throat rip on the board (there are… so… many… throat rips….) The resolution of the hostage crisis is MacGruber at its absolute indignant best and, full disclosure, I’m laughing out loud thinking about the first hostage in that trade as I write this.
The finale does make a strong calculation in stripping down MacGruber’s fateful confrontation to basics (basics for MacGruber, anyway) in what is a clear homage to a modern action classic. Eight episodes worth of new MacGruber content may have been more potent if they’d been whittled down to even just six. But as MacGruber chases Queeth around the world, extended sequences are peppered in that feel designed to stall the plot, causing the show to stumble from time to time. The second half of an early episode effectively turns into a slasher movie, with MacGruber hiding from an assailant hunting him down. It’s not that any of these stretches of slowed plot development aren’t funny, but the show’s at its most effective when its funny and exciting, especially because the dumb stunts that MacGruber pulls are so much funnier when the stakes are high. MacGruber does have the good sense to end on a resolved note, though with enough wiggle room for another adventure should the series perform well.
from IGN Reviews https://ift.tt/3ma7G3K
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