MacGruber has been gone a long time. For ten years, in fact, he’s been living in a monastery in Mexico, while the world has believed him to be dead. He was attacked at his wedding by his arch nemesis, Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). Except there’s no proof Von Cunth did it, and in the ten years MacGruber has been living underground, Von Cunth has risen to be a prominent businessman with lots of political connections that make him untouchable. Just not to MacGruber, who has never met a man he couldn’t touch. Movies based off Saturday Night Live sketches are very rarely good. What’s funny as a one-off joke, or a series of short jokes, can rarely ever be knitted together to fill a 90 minute movie. I was hoping that MacGruber, the first SNL movie based off the work of digital shorts masters The Lonely Island, would be different. Surely, given that the MacGruber skits are filmed, edited, and broadcast rather than interacted live, that would give MacGruber the edge over, say, It’s Pat or The Roxbury Guys. In some respects, MacGruber is a success. For one thing, it has a much better visual look than your average SNL movie, which is probably due to all the work director Jorma Taccone put in directing all those digital shorts. Then again, it’s an action movie, whereas most of the previous SNL movies have been straight comedies, so it should have more visual appeal. Will Forte does his best, and really works his vaguely Richard Dean Anderson-y face and clothing, but the film’s few funny moments come not from Forte, but from the always game Kristen Wiig’s Vicki St. Elmo and Val Kilmer’s villainous Dieter Von Cunth. Unfortunately, the real laughs are few and far between, and MacGruber‘s chuckles are too few for a movie of 99 minutes. The movie’s use of crudeness and vulgarity as a substitute for comedy is well attempted, but not entirely successful.  There’s only so much you can do with one joke, and aside from the constant background of 80s yacht rock in MacGruber’s car, there’s not much about the Gruber to make a movie from. US correspondent Ron Hogan put this review together using a copper wire, pliers, a bag of gravel, and string cheese. Find more by Ron at his blog, Subtle Bluntness, and daily at Shaktronics and PopFi.