- 7
...a raunchy, broadly played farce that may amuse -- and almost certainly will surprise -- even non-fans of the Saturday Night Live sketches that inspired it
—Joe Leydon Variety
- 7
You may miss one joke while still laughing at the last one -- I certainly did, at the film's premiere at SXSW.
—Karina Longworth Village Voice
- 7
...agreeably diverting...
—Robert Abele Los Angeles Times
- 7
MacGruber is crude. It's obscene. The dialogue is puerile and the jokes adolescent. And for the most part, it's hilarious: a bawdy riot drunk on impropriety, which is why the movie works.
—John DeVore Premiere
- 7
How the hell can you take an SNL skit that runs 90 seconds and stretch it to a 90-minute feature? Sounds excruciating. But MacGruber breaks the jinx by putting the skit in the context of a 1980s action movie and creating its own brand of explosive lunacy.
—Peter Travers Rolling Stone
- 6
...a Scary Movie approach to comedy: Toss out 10 gags a minute and hope that one sticks. And while some of the gags work, most aren't laugh-out-loud funny. More chuckle inducing...
—Peter Paras E!
- 6
Like many a contemporary lowbrow comedy, MacGruber's at its best when it's most vulgar, when its foul-mouthed and essentially insane hero is free to indulge in his signature bits of raunchy whimsy.
—Andrew Schenker Slant Magazine
- 4
...a naughty throwaway in all senses of the word throwaway -- 90 minutes of talented performers doing and saying dumb, crude stuff in pursuit of an elusive laugh, in a disposable action-comedy primarily geared to young men and the 11-year-old boys who will want to sneak into the R-rated screening.
—Lisa Schwarzbaum Entertainment Weekly
- 4
The first 15 minutes are really funny, the next 30 mildly amusing and the rest a bit of a bore.
—Roger Moore Chicago Tribune
- 2
How bad is this movie? So bad that critics weren't allowed to see it until four hours before it opened. So bad that to play the villain it was forced to hire the lumpy, inert remnants of what used to be Val Kilmer.
—Kyle Smith New York Post