As opposed to the cast of Saturday Night Live’s most recent super-hit sketch, “Bridesmaid Speech,” I did not spend my most recent weekend “in the bathroom googling Domingo.”
I was, instead, googling how the characters in one of Sony Picture’s newest projects, “Saturday Night,” were somehow outdoor ice skating in the middle of October. While I am no expert on the logistics of climate change in 1975, I can pretty confidently say that the temperatures were not that frigid halfway through fall.
Upon the film’s release on Sep. 27, I was anticipating that there would most likely be similar comedic antics just like the aforementioned ice-skating escapade. With its plot centered around the tumultuous 90 minutes before the first airing of the New York live comedy show, household name Saturday Night Live (often abbreviated to SNL), I was initially thrilled to see the inception of the show come to life on the big screen. Capturing the essence of some of SNL’s most dignified legends such as Chevy Chase, Dan Aykroyd, Jane Curtin, John Belushi, and—the mastermind behind every production—producer Lorne Michaels, this origin story of one of the most renowned American comedy shows sounds, in theory, like it would make the perfect entertainment.
Yet, something made evident almost immediately, there is truly so much you can depict in just a 90-minute time frame.
As a result of such a skimpy interval of time, there were glaring repercussions that—by the time the end credits rolled—were left completely unresolved. Characters were thrown in and out of the screen like whack-a-mole, key players were left completely undeveloped, and Lorne Michaels spent almost the entirety of the movie aimlessly pacing in erratic precision around the hallways, mumbling on about another element of the show that needed to reach its finite perfection.
Yet even with the sporadic and indirect nature of the film, the main dilemma was that it was simply too dull and repetitive. The entire time I spent watching, I was waiting for a climax—or anything borderline stimulating to happen, for that matter. Precious minutes spent panning to irrelevant clips of Michael’s toying with a corroborated setlist of the night’s performers could have been utilized to connect the viewers to the characters, as almost every cast member on “Saturday Night” had virtually no expanding storyline and existed purely just to crack jokes and be in a state of constant, cataclysmic panic.
The most substantial advancement in the plot that I initially identified came with the nail-biting first-airing of “Saturday Night Live,” an event that had been extensively—to say the least—built up throughout the movie before this moment. As the anxious audience settled into their seats, the cast readied themselves into position, and the lights came up over the sketch setlist, it seemed as though viewers and I alike were finally seeing the outcome of the laborious preparation and mayhem come to its satisfactory fruition.
But just as Chevy Chase called out his opening line of the show, “Live from New York! It’s Saturday Night,” the movie ended. The 90-minute swell of stress, hysteria, and drudgery came to no apparent fulfillment, and the movie itself was essentially just a prolonged beginning with no end.
There were, however, a few aspects I greatly appreciated, most notably the impeccable acting and comedic timing of some of the actors. Cory Michael Smith, who played Chevy Chase, hit every joke and pun with impeccable wit and charm, perfectly embodying the humorous personality of the character he was portraying. Lamorne Morris, while making fewer appearances than other members, seized every opportunity he had on screen with his quirks and amiable intensity as comedian Garret Morris.
In many ways, “Saturday Night” was a parallel to the experience of tuning into a disjointed SNL sketch, with some scenes hitting the mark and others falling flat. And while the real SNL show has the fortunate luxury of simply skipping into the next sketch, this film dragged along like a painfully contrived episode whose hysteria never seemed to end. While the premise of the film itself had potential, it truly didn’t capture the magic and chemistry of the early SNL cast and everything that made them such revolutionary comics, leaving me—like Lorne Michaels in the movie—pacing around and wondering what might have been.
