Not Ready For Primetime

"Saturday Night" is unfortunately a mediocre 109-minute SNL sketch.

If you’re going to watch Gabriel LaBelle play a young, money-hungry, womanizer, running around with his head cut off, on a time crunch and in clothes that don’t fit him … might I suggest Snack Shack over Saturday Night? Both movies came out in 2024, but only one correctly uses LaBelle and has fun in its youthful, mischievous ways.

Saturday Night, for those who don’t know, is about this "little show that could” called Saturday Night Live—perhaps you’ve heard of it. Like its inspiration, Saturday Night features a lot of great actors wearing wigs and minimizing their talent in order to push some weird politics: Lorne Michaels is (and always has been) a genius, Jim Henson is a loser puppeteer, all of the union members behind the show are lazy idiots?

Obviously, things are hyperbolized and exaggerated and pushed together for effect and runtime, but the entire 109-minute exercise just felt like an extended SNL sketch told from the wrong point of view. If we wanted something daring or a bit more interesting, Michaels can’t be the main character. It would instead be his assistant or one of the lowly writers or a cast member going through inner turmoil. We know Lorne Michaels is successful; there’s little gravitas when the rich person wins. This is at its core a crude hagiography.

The Jason Reitman film feels like an extension of the SNL Universe, perfectly timed for the show’s 50th season, which feels a bit dirty when you think about it. Michaels is cementing his legacy as the show cements its own. At the end of the day, it’s just a bunch of rich white men patting themselves on their backs.

Now, I’m not as harsh on Reitman as most. Despite its over-the-top maudlin nature, I’m pro Up in the Air. Juno and Thank You for Smoking are both solid as well. But, Reitman capitalizing on his father’s Ghostbusters property and this new SNL treatise feel like cynical plays that started with the bottom line and corporations first.

Film critic Adam Nayman put its best with the following section from his Saturday Night skewering:

It’s worth asking, circa 2024, what kind of filmmakers would seek to further enshrine Saturday Night Live in general and its intractable, multimillionaire commander in chief in particular … At one point, their Michaels invokes Che Guevara in his presentation to NBC’s money men. Later the filmmakers literally set their hero next to the sculpture of Prometheus adorning the entrance to Rockefeller Center—a moment that is pretty definitively not played for laughs.

—The New Republic

Now, that’s a lot of words attacking Saturday Night, but I still have to admit that it’s a decent movie wrapped up in a bizarre coating. The actors—especially Rachel Sennott as writer Rosie Shuster, Cory Michael Smith as Chevy Chase and Andrew Barth Feldman as fictional assistant Neil Levy—are giving their all, as is the never-stopping Birdman-esque camera work that has you feeling anxious and slightly nauseous.

It’s not a bad movie but just a re-enaction of things that have happened without any more meaning to it. Very reminiscent of the worst types of SNL sketches and recent plucked-from-the-headlines movies like Bombshell, She Said or Dumb Money. All are varying degrees of bad to good, but there’s a center of the Venn Diagram in which all don’t have a deeper purpose other than saying “Things are crazy.”

My favorite SNL sketches are when things go off the rails or the premise comes out of nowhere. I don’t need someone to tell me that Donald Trump is an idiot. If you don’t know that by now, I don’t know what rock you’ve been hiding under. Instead of these biopics, just give The Lonely Island money to make another insane movie. Always trust Andy Samberg. Always.