MacGruber on DVD

2/5
(15+) US. Will Forte, Kristen Wiig, Val Kilmer, Ryan Phillippe
After Hot Shots!, Austin Powers and Team America, is there still mileage in the slapstick action-movie pastiche? Based on a recurring Saturday Night Live sketch, MacGruber sees SNL stalwart Will Forte’s titular secret agent roused from a jungle retreat and pressed into CIA service in an effort to track down Val Kilmer’s nuclear-warhead-wielding terrorist, Dieter von Cunth. There are a handful of quality gags – most of them at the expense of mullet-man MacGruber’s Clarksonesque fashion sense – and Forte surrounds himself with solid performers, notably Kilmer as the preening psychopath and Powers Boothe as a grouchy CIA bigwig. But it all feels terribly routine, and as the script attempts to paper over the gaps between good gags with violence and pratfalls, it becomes clear that this well has run bone dry.