For nearly 50 years, Saturday Night Live has been a television staple providing weekly laughs and social commentary, occasionally expanding into feature-length comedies that often feel as hit-or-miss as the sketch series itself. Fans haven't seen a proper film entry since 2010's MacGruber (which was itself spunoff into the streaming series of the same name), but that dearth ends with the release of Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, a featire that kept me giggling, tittering, chortling and snickering for around 90% of its entire runtime. It's the funniest SNL movie since all things Wayne's World, and that's not just the Trulys talking.
Release Date: November 17, 2023 (Peacock)
Directed By: Paul Briganti
Written By: Martin Herlihy & John Higgins & Ben Marshall
Starring: Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, Ben Marshall, Bowen Yang, Meg Stalter, X Mayo, Nichole Sakura, Conan O’Brien, and John Goodman
Rating: R for pervasive language, sexual material, some drug material, brief graphic nudity and violence
Runtime: 92 minutes
The first full-length effort from the viral video-producing trio that make up Please Don’t Destroy — Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall — The Treasure of Foggy Mountain isn’t going to be remembered as the deepest or most emotionally gripping release of 2023 or any other year, and it doesn’t have any big Marvel or DC superheroes, Disney princesses, evil animatronics, or thousands of screaming Taylor Swift fans. This automatically makes it a refreshing watch, leaning heavily on a complete lack of prior knowledge or invested expectations. And the fact that it’s a Peacock exclusive release only helps, because pausing and rewinding will be necessary to hear some of the follow-up jokes that get lost beneath constant bursts of billowing laughter.
As it often goes with projects birthed out of Saturday Night Live, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain hangs its laughs on a fairly simple plot and the strength of its core characters. The movie’s Martin, Ben and John have been best friends for more than half of their lives, with the origins of their kinship tying back to the most embarrassing experience of John’s life and a seemingly not-so-mysterious compass.
Now in their mid-20s, the pals are being pulled in different directions that put strains on the ties that bond. Ben is aiming to better follow in the professional footsteps of his outdoorsy store-managing father, as played with atypical harshness by talk show legend Conan O’Brien. Martin is getting more serious with his girlfriend (Superstore’s Nichole Sakura), to the point where he’s converting to Christianity. Meanwhile, John’s issues stem largely from not having a personal life of his own to fall back on, and his attempt to rekindle the friendship with a hunt for a local treasure goes about as well as anything does in an R-rated comedy. Which is to say, hilariously and with sporadic genitalia injuries.
Please Don’t Destroy easily clears the jump from SNL’s viral shorts to full-length feature.
Despite becoming household names on the back of such short-form SNL winners as “Three Sad Virgins,” featuring Taylor Swift, Please Don’t Destroy doesn’t need truncated time frames to bring the magic, and The Treasure of Foggy Mountain nails a key detail that works against other projects crafted by the sketch series’ alums: it’s not based on limited-scope characters with highly specified behavioral quirks. I adore Will Forte’s MacGruber and Tim Meadows’ Leon Phelps as much as anyone, but characters like that (and Julia Sweeney’s Pat and Molly Shannon’s Mary Katherine Gallagher) work best in strictly designated stories and scenarios, and can still get a little long in the tooth even in the most ideal circumstances.
In contrast, Ben, Martin and John are essentially normal, dorky, in-joke-loving dudes, but it’s the world they exist in that’s overtly heightened. This allows them to traverse from broadly comedic sequences, to over-the-top jump scares, to Goonies-esque adventure without the core trio ever feeling out of place. In that way, they’re most similar to Mike Myers’ Wayne and Dana Carvey’s Garth — or Dan Aykroyd and John Belushi’s Blues Brothers before them — whose appeal is built upon the actors’ irreplaceable chemistry together. If Please Don’t Destroy and director Paul Briganti crafted this film for three disparate comedians meeting for the first time, it might still be amusing, but it wouldn’t deliver all the same priceless morsels that Foggy Mountain has in droves.
PDD: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain made me laugh harder and more often than anything else this year.
With second and third place going to the latest season of I Think You Should Leave and the A.I. podcast Dudesy, I can safely say Foggy Mountain provides more laughs per capita than anything else I've experienced in 2023. To the point where its runtime, a relatively brief 90+ minutes, seems longer than it is, purely because my face legitimately felt sore from the smile never leaving my face.
Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall are adept with the full gamut of comedic stylings, whether it’s dad-approved wordplay, awkward facial expressions, or vaudevillian physical comedy, and no moments are too big or too small. (Arguably my favorite line is a barely seen passerby’s singular hope for the trio’s friendship to end.) A talented and familiar roster of co-stars are on-hand to help with the laughs-per-minute ratio too.
Hacks’ Meg Stalter and The Blackening’s X Mayo star as two park rangers who fiendishly plan to steal the lucrative treasure from under the three friends’ noses, despite Stalter’s character engaging in an enjoyably uncomfortable infatuation with John. Meanwhile fellow Saturday Night Live star Bowen Yang is the leader of a monochromatic cult that also has ties to the valuables behind hunted down, with Reno 911! vet Cedric Yarbrough as one of the flock. Add to that John Goodman working the mic as narrator, and a pretty unforgettable cameo from Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo.
Despite a waning third-act, Please Don’t Destroy’s trio keeps viewers invested in the bonkers adventure.
As is often the case with wacky plots, not everything that goes on in Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is as flawless as Conan O’Brien’s facial hair. The co-writers deserve credit for taking their story farther than just A-B-C simplicity, and I’m glad the entire shebang isn’t just a long interruption-plagued quest. But as far as plot elements go, the not-really-threatening park rangers aren’t the most organic choice for sub-antagonists, though the actresses make it work regardless.
The same possibly can’t be said for Bowen Yang’s cult, which feels far more like a settled-upon idea rather than anything intuitively inspired. Yang himself is surprisingly one of the movie’s weakest points, possibly because his character serves as more of a caricature than a real person. Still, even the flimsiest link in a chain as strong as this is still above-the-line enjoyable, and it's not as if Yang is capable of being terrible in anything, so it's a hiccup in a sea of guffaws.
Please Don’t Destroy has proven time and again through SNL's shorts that the actors technically don’t ever need other comedians or celebrities around in order to be the funniest thing on TV at any given moment. And perhaps there’s a world where their first full-length feature took more of a low-budget and subdued approach, with Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall looking for treasure in their backyard instead of on yonder Foggy Mountain. But I’m thankful that they were given a chance to show off their skills on a far broader scale, and if whatever they do next is as good as Wayne’s World 2, then game on, Garth.
