The Late Val Kilmer Was ‘Proud of How Bad’ ‘MacGruber’ Turned Out
Movie legend Val Kilmer passed away yesterday at the age of 65, but his memory will live on in the hearts of the dozens of comedy fans who saw MacGruber in theaters.
The 2010 action/comedy MacGruber, based on the Saturday Night Live sketch by the same name, may have been a total flop at the box office, failing to even earn back its $10 million budget, but at least it earned the scorn of the critical community to match its commercial failure. As it turns out, neither moviegoers nor movie reviewers at the time had any interest in seeing a profane, illogical and hilariously dated feature-length adaptation of an overdone SNL sketch that parodied a TV show that had been off the air for nearly 20 years. However, MacGruber’s titular star Will Forte and his onscreen nemesis Kilmer didn’t give a cut-off dick about what anyone else thought of their glorious turd of a comedy masterpiece.
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Fifteen years later, MacGruber now has veritable cult-classic status and a series adaptation on Peacock as comedy fans have retrospectively deemed it to be one of the most shamelessly funny shitshows ever put to film. Today, as the movie world mourns Kilmer whose filmography includes such blockbusters and critical darlings as Heat, Top Gun and Tombstone, let’s also take time to reflect on one of the biggest bombs of Kilmer’s career that he loved almost as much as MacGruber loved ripping out throats.
Back in May 2010, just one day before MacGruber would premiere with a dismal opening that the fourth Shrek film dwarfed in the weekend box office, Kilmer was hilariously candid about the cinematic quality of his newest project in a conversation with The Wall Street Journal. “I’m proud of how bad this film is,” admitted Kilmer, who played MacGruber’s arch-nemesis and former college best friend Dieter Von Cunth in the delightful dud. “In fact, I can’t believe I just called it a film. It’s a two-hour skit.”
While Kilmer refused to pretend The Lonely Island star Jorma Taccone’s feature film directorial debut was in any way a cohesive work of cinema, the acting legend only had hyperbolic praise for the X-rated humor that Taccone and Forte pulled out of the SNL sketch character. Kilmer says that Taccone and Forte secured his participation in MacGruber with “no comparison, the funniest read-through I’ve ever been to,” saying of his new co-stars Forte and Kristen Wiig, “They’re both in their own class, when it comes to subtle comedy, and in terms of classlessness, MacGruber is truly one of the dumbest characters ever.”
As the most veteran and venerated film professional on the set of MacGruber, Kilmer naturally had notes for the project when he first signed on, but, very quickly, he realized that the doomed comedy was perfectly disastrous just the way it was. “The writers were absolutely convinced that the film didn’t need any kind of intro to sell the story, and it’s their world, you just have to trust the director sometimes,” said Kilmer of the narrative nonsense that could losely be described as the “plot” of MacGruber. “The writers challenged each other to be as vile as possible, and they succeeded.”
The resulting “film” nearly destroyed Forte’s career and basically put the final nail in the coffin for film adaptations of SNL sketches, but the insane, obscene, over-the-top comedy of MacGruber made it one of the last truly hilarious R-rated comedies of its time, and, thankfully, Kilmer lived long enough to see his favorite shitty movie turn into a comedy classic.
Rest in piece, Cunth.
