Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain Review: A Cheerfully Slapdash Sketch-Comedy Adventure
Sketch comedy is inherently hit-or-miss. When you watch any given episode of the comic staple "Saturday Night Live," it's hard to imagine a single installment over its nearly 50-year run that is wall-to-wall perfection; some sketches and running gags and characters are just stronger than others. The same can be true for movies either inspired by famous sketches or created by sketch-comedy writers and performers. The latest example is the straight-to-Peacock feature film "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain," in which the three guys of Please Don't Destroy, best known for their sketches on recent seasons of "SNL," team up to save their friendship and locate a multi-million-dollar treasure before anyone else does. Portions of this film are clever or funny (though not often to the level of laugh-out-loud hilarious), but even clocking in at 90 minutes, it wears out its welcome.
John Higgins, Martin Herlihy, and Ben Marshall play (unsurprisingly) John, Martin, and Ben, a trio of best friends in suburbia who work for a sporting goods store run by Ben's overly officious father (Conan O'Brien). Though Ben has some baffling designs on taking over his dad's store, John wants badly to pursue other dreams in life and is equally bothered by Martin going through a religious conversion to please his girlfriend (Nichole Sakura). Soon enough, John convinces his friends to join him on a quest to find a mysterious treasure deep in Foggy Mountain, in spite of many other treasure hunters having gone missing over the years. The "that escalated quickly" style of comedy is such that their search quickly leads them to run afoul of a forest-based cult and get into various violent scrapes.
The plot, as is often the case with sketch-comedy films like "Hot Rod," is beside the point once the setup gets out of the way. Each of the three leads' subplots lends itself to some humor, whether it's in John and Ben riffing on how out-of-place Martin looks when preparing to get baptized or in the film's narrator (John Goodman, because why not) describing a childhood trauma of John's. There are (naturally) good bits here, though the slapdash nature of the film, directed by Paul Briganti, sometimes seems as much like a comic choice as a necessity of a presumably low budget. (There are more than a handful of one-liners that sound as if they were recorded during ADR sessions in post-production, while the characters spouting those lines are either off-screen or their backs are facing the camera.)
A loopy take on a familiar comic staple
One of the more telling production credits in "The Treasure of Foggy Mountain" is that of producer Judd Apatow, whose own comic resume only grows more impressive over time. As much as this film is defined by its cheerfully outlandish humor and one-off visual gags, there is a mild stab at an emotional throughline in which John is getting more and more frustrated with how Martin and Ben seem to be growing beyond him and attempting (even half-heartedly) to be more mature. The film is only halfway committed to following this through, even if it's somewhat like a parody of other Apatow-produced or directed films like "Superbad" and "The 40-Year-Old Virgin." Considering the outrageous violence at the climax of "The Treasure of Foggy Mountain," you get the sense that the three leads and writers are more in line with the "Anchorman" school of comedy; that, too, was produced by Apatow but far less invested in any emotional connections.
All three of the leads acquit themselves well (and clearly have the same amount of chemistry that they've exhibited in their past non-feature work), though Herlihy may slightly outshine his castmates, especially once Martin unleashes his profane alter ego in the climax. And it's funny in a particularly ridiculous way to see O'Brien, one of the great late-night talk-show hosts, sport a goatee and serve as the purported grown-up of the film in a supporting role. (Of course, it's doubly funny to see him in an NBC Universal project, considering how the company parted ways with him in 2010.) But the performances here are as beside the point as the plot — it's about whether or not "The Treasure of Foggy Mountain" is funny, and how often it's funny.
We're more than 15 years removed from the Lonely Island's first film, "Hot Rod." On one hand, that movie too is fairly slapdash and hit-or-miss; on the other, with hindsight, it's kind of remarkable to see how members of its cast (not just Andy Samberg, but also Bill Hader and Danny McBride) have moved on to bigger and better things. That small-town comedy served as a jumping-off point for its talented cast and crew, leading to an even funnier film in the 2010s ("Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping") and plenty of other remarkable shows and films. With that in mind, "Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain" may one day be seen as the start of a massive future for its three stars. For now, it's a hit-or-miss affair, but one that hits slightly more than it misses.
/Film Rating: 6 out of 10