Please Don’t Destroy, the comedy troupe consisting of Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall—routinely the best thing about Saturday Night Live thanks to the troupe’s brilliant short films—gets its first feature-length movie with Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain.
The movie has a lot of good laughs stretched over a plot that wears a bit thin in its second half, but the movie is good-natured and funny enough to be worth your while, especially if you are familiar with PDD.
Things start strong as we see the boys reporting to work at the Scheel’s-like megastore Trout Plus, where Ben’s angry father (the one and only Conan O’Brien, killing it in the role) longs for his son to take life seriously and stop feeding bread to the turtles. While Ben seeks fatherly love, Martin is preparing for an adult baptism to impress his girlfriend (Nichole Sakura), and John combats loneliness.
While surfing nature porn, John discovers that a relic he has in his possession contains a map to the Treasure of Foggy Mountain, which eventually results in the boys going on a wilderness trek. The camping stuff is funny enough, but things get a little tired when they encounter a cult led by SNL’s Bowen Yang.
Despite the plot going a little off track, the laughs remain consistent—in the same, silly way their SNL shorts provide humor. The guys revel in nonsense, and it’s hard to watch them for any length of time without giggling. That said, a film where they’d just stayed at Trout Plus and dealt with daily life, or a movie with them getting lost in the woods without the treasure hunt and cult stuff, might’ve been preferable.
This one went straight to streaming, so it remains to be seen if they’ll get another shot at movies beyond SNL shorts. In the meantime, Please Don’t Destroy fans will find it good for some laughs—while the uninitiated might be slightly baffled.
Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is now streaming on Peacock.
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Originally posted 2023-11-20 19:13:24.