Where Are the Laughs? Another SNL Sketch Flounders on the Big Screen.

If you like movies that feature its characters dancing around with celery stuck up their butt, then MacGruber is the film for you. Here is an incessantly stupid, mindlessly vulgar, and desperately unfunny bomb that further proves an already established fact: "Saturday Night Live" sketches just do not translate onto the big screen. With the exception of "Blues Brothers" and "Wayne's World", every movie based on an SNL sketch-----"Coneheads", "A Night at the Roxbury", "The Ladies Man"-----has been a dud. "MacGruber" makes for a consistently funny three or four minutes on SNL, but the movie is lifeless and soul-sapping.

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I'm all for extremely raunchy and offensive humor. Some of my favorite comedies of the last 25 years include "The 40-Year-Old Virgin", "Knocked Up", and "Superbad". So it's not the vulgarity itself in "MacGruber" that bothers me. Rather, it's the fact that the vulgarity is totally gratuitous and completely devoid of creativity. Take the scene where MacGruber has sex in a cemetery with the ghost of his deceased wife, for example. This scene lingers with no semblance of humor whatsoever. Rather than making me laugh, this scene just made me want to take a shower. It is painfully obvious that the minds behind this film's material deliberately clogged with the film with nudity and profanity. All of which is fine by me, as long as it is funny. And believe me folks, funny is something this film is not.

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Perhaps the most disappointing aspect of "MacGruber" is the vast waste of talent. I like Will Forte and Kristen Wiig, especially Wiig, whose enormous talent and charming quirkiness is evident on SNL and also in her scene-stealing roles in "Knocked Up" and "Date Night". I'm also a fan of Val Kilmer and Ryan Phillippe, two terrific actors that are utterly lost in this material. Kilmer is especially laughable in his egregiously overacted role as the villain. But hey, I guess we all do things for the paycheck occasionally.

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Lorne Michaels is a smart guy, so why does he continue to allow his show to get embarrassed on the big screen? After "MacGruber", here's hoping SNL sketches stay on the small screen. Film buffs have suffered enough.