Timothy V. Murphy | Through the Shattered Lens

A nuclear warhead has been stolen and Captain Jim Faith (Powers Boothe) knows just who to recruit to track it down. Former CIA agent MacGruber (Will Forte) agrees to come out of retirement, so he can save the world from Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), the man who blew up MacGruber’s fiancée (Maya Rudolph) on the day of their wedding.

MacGruber re-assembles his old team. Sure, Vicki St. Elmo (Kristen Wiig) no longer wants to be a part of the adventure and MacGruber refuses work with Lt. Dixon Piper (Ryan Phillippe) but he still brings together a collection of men who look like they eat carburetors for breakfast. And then he accidentally blows them up. MacGruber’s assembling a new team! While mentoring Dixon and falling in love with Vicki, MacGruber seeks his revenge on Cunth. He also makes peace with his past by having sex with his fiancée’s ghost on her tombstone.

Based on the SNL skit that was itself based on a one-joke premise, MacGruber is a surprisingly entertaining action comedy, mixing frequently crude humor with heartfelt pathos. MacGruber works because, even while it makes fun of action movies, it still respects the rules of the genre. The jokes and the bullets fly with equal power. MacGruber is an idiot but he’s also the only man who can save Washington from Cunth’s plot and Will Forte does an admirable job of delivering every bizarre line of dialogue with a fully committed straight face.. Val Kilmer plays Cunth as being a classic action villain, right down to his dismissive attitude and his long-winded speeches. Kristen Wiig is both sexy and adorably awkward as the love interest. And Ryan Phillippe does a surprisingly good job as the the one person who seems to understand how crazy MacGruber really is. Every good comedy needs a good straight man and Ryan Phillippe proves himself to be more than up to the task.

MacGruber is full of quotable lines and scenes that are so out-there that you might need to rewind and confirm that you actually saw what you just did. There have been a lot of bad Saturday Night Live movies. MacGruber is one of the good ones.

For a few months, I’ve been going back and forth on whether or not I wanted to review American Siege.

On the one hand, I try to review every film that I see, regardless of how bad (or good) it might be. I love movies. I love talking about them. I love writing about them. I love sharing my opinions about them and hearing and reading the opinions of others. That goes for all films, even really bad ones like American Siege.

On the other hand, American Siege is also one of the films that Bruce Willis made shortly before announcing his retirement from acting. Since his retirement was announced, there have been a lot of stories that have suggested that Bruce’s condition led to him accepting a lot of roles that he normally would not have even considered and that Willis was not always fully aware of what was happening on the sets of the films in which he appeared. Regardless of how much of that is true or not, it’s a heart-breaking story and it makes it difficult to watch Willis in a film like American Siege.

In American Siege, Willis plays a sheriff in a small Georgia town. When a group of loud rednecks take a local pharmacist hostage, Willis and his deputies drive out to the man’s house. However, Willis is ordered to stand down by the richest man in town, who is played by Timothy V. Murphy. It turns out that the pharmacist has evidence that links Murphy to an unsolved crime. The rednecks might be loud and stupid and self-destructive but it turns out that they’re not actually the worst people in town.

American Siege is 90 minutes of people shouting at each other and pointing guns out of windows. There’s not much of a story to be found and even the unsolved mystery is a bit of a dud. As was typical of his last few films, Bruce Willis is only on screen for a few minutes and he delivers his lines in a heart-breakingly flat monotone. The rest of the cast is actually okay, even if they do go bit a overboard with the fake Southern accents. The rednecks are convincingly redneck-y and Murphy is convincingly condescending as the rich man who has never had to face any consequences for his actions. But the main reason anyone is going to watch this film is because of Bruce Willis and, sadly, there’s none of the swagger that made Willis in a superstar.

So, why am I reviewing American Siege? Mostly it’s so I can recommend that, if you are really determined to watch one Bruce Willis’s later films, you skip American Siege and watch Gasoline Alley. Gasoline Alley was made by the same director and it also features Bruce Willis but it’s a hundred times better than American Siege and it actually gives Willis a decent role to go out on.

Of course, my ultimate recommendation, as far as all this is concerned, is that you go and rewatch the first three Die Hards. They’re not just for Christmas!