Like a Gen Z version of The Lonely Island but with a lot more smash-cuts and screaming, comedy trio Please Don’t Destroy — Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall — has made a name for themselves on the strength of the surreal and frequently self-deprecating digital shorts they contribute to “Saturday Night Live.” In “Plirts,” they pitched Austin Butler on the idea of wearing a shirt made out of plastic. In “Tommy,” the boys make the shocking discovery that their best friend is actually a 67-year-old Irish man (Brendan Gleeson). “We Got Her a Cat” is nominally about trying to surprise Zoë Kravitz with a new pet, but the real punchline is the reveal that Paul Dano has been living in the Please Don’t Destroy office while doing research for a movie about “three guys who suck.”
Where their forebears poked fun at pig-headed masculinity with skits like “Dick in a Box” and “I’m on a Boat,” Please Don’t Destroy mine a lot of their humor from the complete absence of masculinity; from the weird desperation of trying to fill that gap in a world where reality itself is just a flimsy construct. And where The Lonely Island leveraged their “SNL” success into a wacky debut feature that nobody saw even though it was destined to become something of a beloved cult object, Please Don’t Destroy have… well, OK, they’ve done exactly the same thing.
Idiosyncratic to a tee and flecked with occasional moments of idiotic genius, “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” may not be funny enough to ensure the kind of afterlife that awaited “Hot Rod,” but releasing it straight to Peacock practically guarantees that it’ll bomb just as hard, which might be the best thing that can happen to the kind of quasi-outsider comedy whose fans will always feel like the movie is a secret buried just for them to find.
The rare film that begins with a Bruno Mars quote (“The Reader” being the only other example that comes to mind), “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” tells the inspirational true story of three nerdy childhood friends in the Pacific Northwest who all work together at a massive fishing gear store called Trout Plus. Back when they were kids, they bonded over regular forays into Foggy Mountain on the outskirts of town (and also over the time when John set his penis on fire during a 7th grade magic show), one of which ended with the discovery of a mysterious compass. As deadbeat adult roommates, however, the boys are all starting to pull in different directions.
Martin — the lanky one who “looks like Tim Burton drew him” — is trying to buy a house with his super Christian girlfriend. Ben, the redhead, is desperate to impress his dad, who runs Trout Plus with an iron fist and happens to be played by a perfectly cast Conan O’Brien, whose mere presence is enough to give this movie a competitive advantage over 99 percent of the other comedies ever made (“As your father, I say this with all the love I can: I only care about two things in the world: money and power. And you have neither one of them”).
That leaves John, the other one, to serve as the Apatowian manchild who hates feeling like his friends are growing up without him. He spends his Friday nights indoor skydiving by himself at work and dreaming of a new adventure capable of making he and his besties feel like kids again. So when John realizes that the compass from Foggy Mountain is actually a treasure map to a priceless bust of Marie Antoinette, he and the boys are speeding towards their old stomping ground just a few seconds later (“I hope your friendship falls apart!” shouts one of the other motorists they almost run off the road).
Naturally, the treasure proves hard to find. As John Goodman’s should’ve-been-sharper narration wonders: “Treasure. Why is it always so goddamn hard to find?” In this case, however, the treasure isn’t hard to find because of the horny and/or scheming park rangers who try to get there first (Meg Stalter and X Mayo, both very funny), or because it’s guarded by the sort of CG abomination that Hagrid would’ve euthanized without a second thought, or even because it eventually falls into the hands of a fuschia-obsessed forest cult led by Bowen Yang. No, the treasure is hard to find because it’s actually in the boys’ hearts all along. And also because of all that other stuff too, I guess.
On paper, even ironically falling back on that old chestnut might seem a little… [the author of this review makes the jerk-off motion in the air], but watching this movie underlines the extent to which Please Don’t Destroy’s comedy has always posited friendship as the only currency that maintains its value from week-to-week. “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” was written by PDD and directed by their usual collaborator Paul Briganti, and so most of its jokes predictably hinge on weaponizing the boys’ dorky whiteness and/or suddenly introducing something wacky that makes everyone on screen shout questions like “why!?!” at the top of their lungs (Ben’s wingsuit has turned him into a human kite, what!!? An immaculate cameo ends in a brutal murder, who!?!, etc).
But the funniest bits — especially the infrequent but always solid pop culture references — tend to rely on the secret language that can only be shared between people who’ve known one another since before they even knew themselves, and on how alien it can be for the boys to see each other in strange new contexts (some all-time face mask work helps maintain some of the energy during a third act that sags under the weight of a drawn-out setpiece that works against PDD’s more hit-and-run comic strengths). I mean, the actual funniest bits are just Conan O’Brien saying things like “Do you know that I’ve killed a living thing every day of my life?,” but I’m trying to make a point.
While “The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” is too warped to ever play things straight or pretend that we have any real emotional investment in its characters, the movie fully embraces how much fun it is to watch people who understand each other on a molecular level — to the point that it becomes easy to appreciate why John is so hellbent on keeping his pals together. Please Don’t Destroy’s first feature may struggle with sustaining a narrative for more than a few minutes at a time, and the rapid-fire rate of its jokes doesn’t entirely compensate for the pockets of dead air that sometimes bubble up between them, but it’s a promising start all the same.
If this is their “Hot Rod,” I can’t wait to see their “MacGruber.”
Grade: B-
“Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain” is now streaming on Peacock.
