MacGruber

Directed by Jorma Taccone. Starring Will Forte, Ryan Phillippe, Kristen Wiig, Val Klimer, Powers Boothe, Maya Rudolph. 16 cert, gen release, 90 min

SATURDAY NIGHT Liveis a little like root beer. The sketch series is one of those American phenomena that just doesn't seem to travel well. Every now and then, while cruising obscure satellite channels, the European viewer will catch sight of Dana Carvey hitting Chris Kattan with a giant banana and wonder if this TV show can really have emerged from the same nation that gave us Richard Feynman and Saul Bellow. It's not often as revolting as Dr Pepper, but it occasionally comes close.

Anyway, all this is in lieu of asking why Universal Pictures is bothering to release the passably amusing MacGruberin these blameless territories. The film is based on a series of SNL sketches that featured Will Forte as a heightened version of popular spanner- wielding, do-it- yourself TV crimefighter MacGyver.

As much a backhanded celebration of 1980s pop culture – all mullets and power ballads – as an engagement with Richard Dean Anderson’s likable hero, the sketches have about as  much currency  here as, well, sugared water flavoured with sarsaparilla.

MacGruber is, essentially, ¨the Austin Powers of the Reagan years. The hero, who has spent the last decade in a monastery, is dragged back from retirement when a deranged maniac (played by the the increasingly mountainous Val Kilmer) makes off with a nuclear weapon.

Hooking up with his glamorous former assistant (an underused Kristen Wiig) and a sceptical army officer (an unexpected Ryan Phillippe), the bumbling MacGruber sets about extricating himself from increasingly hopeless scrapes.

The film frustrates expectations by failing to have its hero construct any of MacGyver’s trademark Heath Robinson devices. It also suffers from the fact that our values are really not all that different to how they were in the 1980s. Whereas Austin Powers came across like a misogynistic hedonist, MacGruber, bad hair and bad leather jacket noted, fits right in to contemporary society.

Heck, some version of Journey's Don't Stop Believinghas been in the charts for the past six months. We are all MacGruber.