Why hasn't there been a good SNL movie in 20 years?
https://www.sfgate.com/tv/article/snl-saturday-night-live-spin-off-movies-15653860.php
Forty-five years after premiering, "Saturday Night Live" is still just about as popular as ever because it lampoons current culture in a way that no one else can. Given that it’s one of the biggest entertainment properties in the world, it’s downright shocking that Lorne Michaels hasn’t milked its golden teet for box office dollars since the 2010 embarrassment “MacGruber” (a sequel thankfully seems to have stalled). It’s also strange to consider that a spin-off hasn’t scored an actual big screen laugh since “The Ladies Man” in the year 2000 (a laugh from me, at least; it didn't fair as well at the box office). Before that, the Live From New York industrial laugh complex churned out five flops in a row. It begs the question, why don’t "SNL" characters translate to theaters?share
Although some sketches do achieve eternal comedic glory, more often than not, age does not shine kindly on the "SNL" style of right-now comedy tropes. The show trades in ephemeral humor, revisiting specific characters is usually cringeworthy (we’re looking at you, Pat). But revisiting the last actually decent "SNL" movie, which I contend is actually its funniest (don’t @ me “Blues Brothers” fans), offers a Courvoisier-sipping clue as to why these films work, and why they very much don’t.
At its core, “The Ladies Man” appears quite problematic in a 2020 lens. Tim Meadows stars as Leon Phelps, a lecherous and lisping late night radio show host who dishes out sex advice that seems mostly to be about da butt. His “little black book” is an overflowing binder, the collateral damage of which leads Will Ferrell to form a proto-incel support group that aims to take a pair of garden sheers to Phelps’s manhood (represented on-screen with a glowing light).
The film earned an R rating, but that R is about as soft as the silk sheets on Leon’s houseboat waterbed (double the ocean motion). The only nudity shows Ladies Man’s bare tattooed ass cheeks, and the simulated sex looks to be supervised by someone who has never passed second base. “The Ladies Man” seems written by and for 13-year-old virgins, which is why I think it manages to dodge any major cancel-worthy moments (the gay jokes about Ferell’s “Greco Roman wrestling partner” come close, but are just cringey, not intolerant).
It’s also lacking in anything that would resemble logic. Typically, an opening line offering to buy a woman a fish sandwich does not lead to coitus. But a sprinkle of "SNL" magic lets him seduce every woman he encounters, including 13-year-old-me’s dreamgirl, Kelly Kapowski from "Saved by the Bell" (Tiffani Thiessen, but she’ll always be Tiffani Amber to me).
“The Ladies Man” epitomizes the "SNL" comic brand of genius in a way that is lost in most of their later films. The beauty of "SNL" sketches is that they don’t have to make perfect sense, the live-wire nature of the show lets the performers sidestep these concerns. That leads to a very high ratio of terrible comedy, until a sketch reaches the awkward tipping point of just nonsensical enough that the actors teeter on the edge of breaking character, which is always the funniest part of the show anyway. And in “The Ladies Man,” Tim Meadows looks like he’s going to break in just about every scene.
Unfortunately, it takes the perfect balance of silliness to turn a half-baked concept to 90 minutes, or it dies a bloody “Night at the Roxbury” death, or worse, withers in “Coneheads” purgatory. Pure star power carried the early "SNL" hits like “Wayne’s World” and “Blues Brothers.” Will Ferrell dutifully slogged through several films he’d probably rather forget in his attempt to monopolize the college dorm room DVD marketplace, but never actually had a decent spin-off of his own. This summer, Pete Davidson made a big starring leap with “King of Staten Island,” but that was its own heavily-tattooed beast.
It may also be that in the last decade, the show has doubled down on riding the zeitgeist and abandoned the marquee recurring bits for headline-driven topical humor, since such a large part of the audience consumes it on YouTube the next day, rather than syndicated Comedy Central re-runs of the '90s. The character that did seem ripe for a film was Weekend Update nightlife correspondent Stefon, played by Bill Hader, who had perhaps the most character breaks in the history of the show. Given that he’s never really seen in his element partying at “New York’s hottest club,” it seems like a real missed opportunity to build more of a backstory, but the writers already burned their play at a nightlife plotline with “Roxbury.”