Early Buzz: MacGruber Premieres at SXSW-We Love Movie

Early Buzz: MacGruber Premieres at SXSW: "

MacGruber

MacGruber premiered last night at SXSW in Austin, and the early reviews have begun to hit the interwebs. I’ve included some excerpts after the jump.

CinemaBlend: “MacGruber is not, even for a second, half as clever as the SNL sketches it’s based upon. Instead it’s an unending string of easy scatological jokes which, despite being easy, it executes really, really well. There’s a sex scene in the latter half of the film that’s sure to be discussed endlessly, and it doesn’t hurt that all the shit references are set to a score composed primarily of perfectly hilarious light rock. Still, it’s hard not to be disappointed that they didn’t find something cleverer to do with this character.” …. “MacGruber doesn’t even attempt to diffuse a single bomb. He does however rip out a few throats, and that’s enough to make MacGruber funnier than any SNL movie since Wayne’s World 2.”

HitFix: “the great conceit of Jorma Taccone’s film version of MacGruber is that it plays like a crappy Rambo sequel. It’s uncanny timing, since this year’s biggest trend seems to be the fetishistic resurrection of ’80s action, with “The Losers” and “The A-Team” and “The Expendables” all coming soon. And here, before any of them, Taccone pretty much nails what they’re all chasing, sending it up even as he embraces it fully. The result is a film that’s easy to watch and consistently funny, even if it is as substantial as a merengue.” … “Technically, the film is very straightforward and pop-art bright and clean, and it moves at all points. It’s a brisk 90 minutes, and at the end, you may not walk away retaining much of it, but that’s not a slight. It’s meant to be a brisk and silly ride, and it totally accomplishes its goals. What more can you ask?”

The Hollywood Reporter: “Utterly disposable but diverting, “MacGruber” manages to spin feature-length product out of an idea that few would try expanding beyond a “Saturday Night Live” skit. Unlikely to catch fire at the box office, it leaves unanswered the question of whether star Will Forte will be able to break out and carry comedies on his own. Screening here in what director Jorma Taccone said was a not-quite-locked cut, the movie stretches the material about as far as it can go.”

IFC: “To answer the immediate question at hand, “MacGruber” is in fact the funniest “Saturday Night Live” spinoff since “Wayne’s World” in 1992. But as anyone who follows such things knows, that isn’t necessarily high praise…” … “it mainly works in the way that Forte’s best sketches do — by taking gags further than anyone else would dare.”

LA Weekly: “…a good half of the dialogue was inaudible thanks to laughs carrying over from the deadpan joke just before. Which is not to say that Macgruber is necessarily any good, but as dumbass comedies go, it was an effective palette cleanser after a weekend of uneven indies.” … “The humor is both absurdly raunchy and gleefully juvenile: gay jokes and poop jokes predominate;” … “Transparently aimed at the middle school-aged boy in all of us, particularly those of us who were middle-school-aged during the late 80s-early 90s, when cineplexes were full of mullet-rocking American heroes who broke all the rules in order to save the day, Macgruber has similarities to Cop Out in its nostalgia for late-Reagan-era notions of badassery”

TheReviewer: “MacGruber was the best SNL comedy since Wayne’s World, which doesn’t mean it was amazing. It was pretty funny and because it was rated R it saved it. If it was PG-13 it would have been horrible. I give it a 3 out of 5 and SNL fans should go check it out when it comes out in May.”