The characters of Saturday Night Live have spawned several successful movies. Many of Mike Myers’ funniest characters gestated from SNL ideas. But… it’s also been responsible for numerous bombs.

Now “MacGruber,” the recurring SNL skit that parodies 80s TV series “MacGyver” (timely) is heading to the big screen. Val Kilmer and Ryan Philippe are in talks to join, so hopefully they’ve seen some sort of comic value in it? Kilmer’s a good judge, right? I’d pay out of my pocket to see him do a second ‘Kiss Kiss Bang Bang’…

If you’ve never seen MacGruber before, the sketches star Will Forte as MacGyver’s son, with Wiig as an assistant. Each week they find themselves, along with that week’s host, in a control room with a ticking bomb. MacGruber gets sidelined by personal issues, and the bomb explodes. Here’s a ‘Pepsi’ sketch (for which SNL actually got paid by the advertiser…).

While MacGruber has always been variations on the same scenario, the film is more of a bizarre Rambo spoof: MacGruber will be a decorated veteran called out of retirement as a monk, in order to fight a villain called Cunth (Kilmer) who has a nuclear warhead and who apparently killed MacGruber’s bride.

The comedy doesn’t quite click for me as a 90 minute feature. I’m trying to inject some optimism into this, as I have been rather miserable in my summation of the films I’ve previewed lately, but I suppose I just look at this and wonder why there isn’t a MacGyver feature film. It’s an odd world, where a spoof gets a movie before the series does.

Source: Dark Horizons