Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (2023)

Rated R for being a quasi-raunchy comedy that includes sexuality, nudity (specifically, dudity), language, violence, scares, alcoholism and all kinds of stuff that is involved in raunchy comedies. It's not even that raunchy.  It just has raunchy comedy vibes.  Here's the deal.  There was the feeling that I should always have my finger on the pause button in case one of my kids decided to come downstairs and say that they were thirsty.  Parenthood is great.  R.

DIRECTOR: Paul Briganti

I often complain about how much I'm not feeling like writing right now.  Today, it might be the most intense, distilled, almost phobia about writing.  Sure, no one is making me do this.  I could just put it off until tomorrow.  Today was almost supposed to be a break from writing my novel or the blog.  But I also didn't want this to be on my To-Do list, so that pile of groceries that's sitting in bags on the floor?  Those are going to have to wait until I knock out a blog about a fairly silly comedy that I have really no hot takes on.  I am the most intense hobbyist that ever existed.

I'm on the outside of the Please Don't Destroy community.  My wife really digs Saturday Night Live.  Often, she'll request that we watch highlights from the previous Saturday when a new episode comes out.  As such, I get these guys.  They're the spiritual successors to the Lonely Island.  That description is so dead-on that I don't know if anyone can really fight me on it.  I'm not saying they're a copy of The Lonely Island.  I'm just saying that they do their own Digital Short thing that's a little off from the standard humor that SNL offers.  As such, they often are the best parts of SNL.  But The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (a title, by the way, that I'm really struggling to get right every time I have to type it) is almost a commentary on how the SNL crew needs to consider whether the transition from the small screen short to the cinematic format of a feature length movie is the best move.

I'm almost exclusively writing this as a review as opposed to an analysis at this point because that's probably where the greater commentary lies with this movie.  One of the more shared quotes from Star Trek: The Next Generation is Picard telling Data that "It is possible to make no mistakes and still lose.  That is not a weakness.  That is life."   That's the most apt review of this movie.  The Please Don't Destroy guys bring their exact sensibilities and unique humor, nail every single joke in the way it is supposed to land, and I still left the movie going "Meh."  It's a really weird reaction considering that they didn't screw up.  They took something I liked, didn't compromise, made a feature length movie, and still...I just didn't care.  There was a point where I was genuinely laughing at the beginning, thinking that this movie was genius.  But at one point, I found myself kind of exhausted.  

Maybe the Please Don't Destroy sense of humor works better in small doses.  That's really unfair to them, but it also might be true.  Things that, on paper, should have absolutely destroyed me, left me lightly blowing air out of my nose.  Seriously, in retrospect, one of the gags at the end of the movie should have had me telling everyone to watch this movie.  Spoiler alert for a movie that doesn't really need a spoiler alert, but when the hawk steals the Macguffin and just flies off, leaving everyone without the treasure, that moment should have destroyed me.  I kept looking over to my wife during that joke, hoping subconsciously (if I can't analyze the movie, I can analyze myself!) that I would have that communal sense of humor.

I would like to think that's what is going on. From what I understand, this was a movie that was a Peacock original.  It never saw a theatrical release.  I might be really wrong about this, but I'm writing against the clock and have no time to really look this up.  (I'm literally writing about how I'm phoning this whole thing in.) But comedies like this thrive on a communion of an audience.  It's interesting.  I can watch scary movies at home, and almost enjoy doing so more, but understand that a scary movie with a lot of people in a dark theater is significantly a more intense experience.  But with a jokes-per-minute comedy?  I think it is essential to the viewing experience.  Maybe that's where the fault of this movie lies.  This is one of those movies that needs a packed theater all cracking up at the same time.  That could be the reason that we aren't seeing intense comedies in the theaters anymore because they are so codependent (I was going to use the word "symbiotic", but I don't want to make it sounds like they help each other, but actually need each other) that the theater can't risk a comedy not being attended.  

I refuse to turn in a blog entry without at least an attempt at analysis.  Also, I really haven't written anything besides the notion that comedies to better with a large audience and I chose to watch it with just my wife who was on her phone audibly watching clips of Donald Trump saying stupid things this week.  The kid of humor that Please Don't Destroy offers is always colored with a metacontextual element that takes the expectation of silly comedies and just almost makes fun of the whole lot.  That sounds like A) they're disrespectful of what came before and B) it sounds mean.  Neither of those statements is necessarily true.  If anything, Please Don't Destroy is almost homaging everything out of a sense of reverence while taking it a step further.  They sit on the shoulders of silly legends and out-silly them.  It never really reaches the level of Adult Swim absurdism.  Rather, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain takes three larger than life characters and never really lets any of them be the actual straightman.

That's actually a pretty solid read on why their comedy comes across the way that it does.  Gun to head, John has to be the protagonist.  He's the one with the primary conflict.  His friends have grown up while he has stayed the same.  Again, if there are only a handful of plots in Hollywood, we know where the movie is going through here. But John also doesn't really live in a reality that exists.  At any moment, a silly situation will be looked on with complete normality.  (I got commented on how a movie took Mystical Realism and adapted it to Horror Realism; The Treasure of Foggy Mountain turned it into Comedy Realism.) Any attempt to bring in a straight man is instantly subverted.  When you cast Conan O'Brien as your disappointed dad, you know there's going to be some Conan standards in there.  The optimistic way to look at this is that the guys who made this movie never really cared if it appealed to mass audiences, but I have a feeling that Lorne Michaels wanted it to.  (Is Lorne Michaels' name on the credits?  Who knows?)

The funny thing is, I kind of liked the movie.  As much as this whole thing is a criticism why it didn't hit, we have to look at the core of what I said.  They technically didn't do anything wrong.  If anything, this is more of a criticism of me and the fact that we don't get silly comedies on wide release.  It is objectively pretty funny.  These guys are doing what they loved.  Heck, honestly, with a different attitude and in a different point in my life, this movie probably would be lauded as much as I hyped up movies like Super Troopers and films like that.  But it did everything right and just didn't really hit?  I liked it, but didn't have fun with it.