Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain
Please Don’t Destroy is not just any sketch comedy group. They are one of the biggest groups from the meme generation. During the pandemic they created short videos for TikTok and Twitter that were viewed by a well known comedy influencer. Once hired as writers for “Saturday Night Live” in 2021, Please Don’t Destroy began to do what Lonely Island did when creating digital shorts for the show. I have seen enough of them to feel hopeful about their first full length film “Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain,” which was originally intended to be released theatrically but will now drop on Peacock. My hope remains even though it has the same problem most films made by sketch comedians do it feels like an hour and a half of ideas for five minute sketches stretched too thin over ninety minutes. There is a hilarious short in here longer than most things they’ve done on “SNL” but shorter than what should be feature length. But there were enough jokes that hit me hard enough to suggest these guys could make their “Popstar: Never Stop Never Stopping,” one of the funnier movies ever made by anyone from “SNL” someday. It’s more forgettable than it should be, but nowhere near the disaster that often happens when members of Lorne Michaels’ troupe walk outside during daytime hours.
“The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” is narrated by John Goodman, who plays with us as he goes along, knowing how silly this all is. It opens at a crossroads where its three leads find themselves at the start of our story if we’re looking for one character to call our lead through this film, we’d probably choose John (John Higgins), named after him twice, because he’s worried about being left behind while his best friends since childhood move on with their lives, Martin (Martin Herlihy), whose girlfriend (Nichole Sakura) has pushed him into intense religious practice; and Ben (Ben Marshall), who wants to impress his dad (Conan O’Brien) by getting into business, working at the Trout Plus superstore owned by him. O’Brien does a lot with only a little in this film, showing once again that there’s almost no one with better comedic timing than him. The same can be said of Bowen Yang as the cult leader and Gaten Matarazzo as Taylor’s brother from “Stranger Things,” who shows up for some very funny scenes. These are just highlights though, and there are other performers that don’t fill their roles quite as well.
But what sets them off on this adventure is John hearing about a nearby mountain legend, where treasure hunters have long known a bust of Marie Antoinette is hidden worth millions of dollars. So they decide to go looking for it. Which would be fine if it didn’t keep going past the point when we thought it was over. It takes them through nature, where they get hunted by a hawk and arrested by two rangers named Taylor (X Mayo) and Megan (Megan Stalter), who also want to find the treasure but fall in love with John along the way even while trying to beat our heroines there. Eventually they end up in the clutches of Yang’s cult, but then they still have another half hour left after that so maybe “Foggy Mountain” doesn’t come in for quite as reasonable of a landing as we thought it might given how close we were to being done already by the time we got there.
The issue is that these guys are so underdeveloped in a 90 minute movie. It’s like they live somewhere between the weird humor of performers like Kyle Mooney and the relatable man-children from producer Judd Apatow’s films. So they just keep getting lost in their own movie, hitting jokes every now and then but never finding characters.
That might not matter in some situations. I’m not saying you have to do drugs to enjoy a comedy, but I bet “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” would work a lot better after a night at the bar than it does on an empty afternoon. It seems like one of those movies made for a group experience when your friend’s laughter and having a drink in your hand can make things like pacing and repeated jokes that don’t work the first time feel almost funny on their own. Please Don’t Destroy themselves are funny enough (even if it’s more as writers than actors at this point), but they should pair up with another troupe next time to learn how to stretch their sketch skills into something longer form maybe Lonely Island? Let’s get Connor4Real on Foggy Mountain and make some comedy history together!
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