Hanging out with obnoxious people can be exciting, but sooner or later you realize it's mostly just obnoxious.

Yes, there are the fun moments, like when you get to see them get beat up by bouncers, but then if you don't carry them to the emergency room somehow you're the bad guy. You know how you treat a ruptured spleen, Dr. Quinn? By walking it off.

Too, there's the vicarious thrill you get from watching them say things you'd never dare. Take that, Denny's waitress who brought the regular Tabasco instead of the green kind! That uniform doesn't match your complexion.

-- Local show times, theaters, trailer.

After a while, though, the thrill is gone, if only because we all have to sober up sometime. Then comes the cold realization you've spent months — possibly years! — with an asshole, which casts strong aspersions on your own moral fiber. So does watching movies about bad people, such as the titular character in MacGruber, make you a bad person, too? Of course not, Tipper Gore. It's just a questionable thing to spend your money on.

When arms dealer Val Kilmer steals a nuclear weapon, the military turns to aid from Will Forte, the retired Green Beret/Navy SEAL/Army Ranger with the ability to turn common items into deadly weapons.

Forte runs into trouble when he accidentally blows up his own team. In desperation, he recruits Kristen Wiig and Ryan Phillippe to help stop Kilmer from blowing up Washington, D.C.

As the most decorated warrior in the history of guys hitting other guys with sticks, Forte is cocky, deluded, and utterly incompetent. I'm not quite sure how these things square with each other. It's either a cutting commentary on what the military values or a severe case of "Who cares that it makes no damn sense he's simultaneously the best and worst soldier of the modern era, it's funnier this way."

Unfortunately, it's not. Forte's a talented comedian, and it's about time someone took that MacGyver fellow down a peg, but the character of MacGruber is awful. If I met him, I would blow him up. Not with a wad of gum and a wind-up toy duck, either. With a grenade. Ideally, several grenades. I'd need to be sure.

Oftentimes, the villain is cooler than the hero, but in this case I think Kilmer's character is actually the better person, too. And he wants to nuke millions of people.

That's MacGruber's big miscalculation. I'm sure these sketches are funny on SNL, but there, you only have to spend 2-5 minutes with the character (and apparently he always gets blown up at the end, thus restoring justice to the world). Spending 99 minutes with this obnoxious clownhole is a demoralizing slog.

Yet it's not completely humorless. The cast is too talented for that, and the obscene, boundary-pushing jokes occasionally hit the mark.

But for the most part, MacGruber suffers from a serious lack of execution. I make better MacGyver parodies every time I have to figure out how to steal my roommate's car to pretend to look for a job. Other than the bit where Forte waddles around with a piece of celery in his ass, the movie fritters away its MacGyver-inspired concept with a bunch of unimaginative jokes.

I'll admit to laughing hard at some of its insane gags — only a coal-hearted snowman wouldn't laugh at Forte screwing the ghost of his dead wife for relationship advice — but MacGruber is too ugly of a movie, and its humor too spotty, to stop me from turning on it. I wish it weren't so.

Grade: C-