This knockabout comedy is based on the Saturday Night Live character created and played by comic Will Forte. Here the bumbling soldier of fortune comes out of retirement to thwart terrorist Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer), who threatens to launch a stolen nuclear warhead on Washington. But the mullet-haired maverick has a style of his own, fashioning weapons out of discarded household items - much like 1980s small-screen hero MacGyver (whom Forte originally set out to parody). Can his by-the-book military sidekick (Ryan Phillippe) stop him from doing more harm than good? What worked well in small doses on US TV's long-running sketch show struggles to build any momentum at feature length, and ultimately comes across as a string of unrelated set-pieces patched together by director Jorma Taccone. Forte is likeable as the renegade good guy but the humour relies too heavily on blatantly telegraphed sight gags and villains with rude-sounding names.

Ex-special operative MacGruber is called back into action to take down his archenemy, Dieter Von Cunth, who's in possession of a nuclear warhead and bent on destroying Washington, DC.