Like The Lonely Island and Pete Davidson before them, Please Don’t Destroy, the trio of NYU-bred comedians known for their Saturday Night Live digital shorts, are spinning off from the variety show into their own feature film. It’s a trend of diminishing returns. Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, their feature comedy debut, was originally slated to premiere in theaters before it got dumped on Peacock, and for good reason. I imagine most people involved don’t want viewers to notice. As comedy writers and movie actors, the members of Please Don’t Destroy – Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall – are out of their depth.
That’s not a knock on their brand of comedy, which works in small doses. I’ve been a fan of some of their sketches, particularly their pre-SNL videos posted on Twitter during the long, bizarre malaise that was being online during Covid. At their best, the trio’s comedy is delightfully inane and snappy, burrowing so deep into an absurd distillation – Spongebob as a forgotten college classmate, Ben stealing Post Malone’s face tattoos, a Netflix doc made about Martin’s life – as to hit magical realism and get stuck in your head. Their style is silly, self-deprecating and powered by the friends’ familiar rapport. These are the guys who recently dressed as Donkey, Puss in Boots and Michael Jackson for a skit called Bad Bunny Is Shrek, and then revealed they wrote it at 1am.
Late-night best friend looniness can work for three minutes. It’s much harder to pull off for 90, and it’s evident from beyond the time it takes to watch Three Sad Virgins that The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, directed by the SNL veteran Paul Briganti, isn’t going to cut it, or get anywhere close to laughs.
Here as elsewhere, the PDD gang play characters named after themselves, childhood best friends and roommates living cartoonishly stunted lives in a mountain town. All three work for Ben’s father (Conan O’Brien, acting as if he’s doing someone a favor, which he is) at his sporting goods store Trout Plus, and all three struggle with adulthood. Bespectacled Martin is dating a born-again Christian and getting adult-baptized; Ben’s proposal to turn the Trout store into a little boy hair salon isn’t winning over his dad; John plays virtual poker with 11-year-olds and finds out about a treasure map on TikTok. The guys wide-eye each other, do a silly little dance and hit the road.
The Treasure of Foggy Mountain has a dulling sense of inevitability to it. The PDD boys gained a following online, so they got on SNL; they had a script that feels like it was conceived in a night, so they got talent, financing and Judd Apatow’s backing; Foggy Mountain had business gravity so now, like a boulder rolling down a hill, there is a movie.
And that appears to be all of the thought put into it. There are limp hijinks on this journey of money and friendship – two park rangers turned rival hunters (Meg Stalter and X Mayo), a secret tunnel, a weird CGI eagle and a cult run by Bowen Yang (I hope he was paid well). Comedic notes include flying suits, the guys doing the Soulja Boy dance, the guys talking about Jennifer’s Body, the guys opening an ancient door by harmonizing, and Stranger Things’ Gaten Matarazzo playing himself. I am listing these elements because there is not much more to say about them, the humor so thin and the goodwill even thinner as time wears on. These would be mediocre Please Don’t Destroy sketches if they were isolated to a few minutes, let alone three half-hour segments, and that includes two bits that play, intentionally or not, as sub-par rip-offs of Tim Robinson’s gloriously deranged sketch series I Think You Should Leave.
If I can praise this film for anything, it’s the PDD members’ unshakable commitment to their bits. They do, at least, seem to be having a good time, or at least trying to see their numbers through to the finish, which goes fully off the rails once you meet the cult (it’s never a good sign when a Taser appears in a comedy). Already by that point, I was relying on the half-distraction of my phone to get me through the patter of quips that I assume worked much better on paper. I do, actually, root for Please Don’t Destroy, whose work has genuinely made me laugh many times. But as proof of concept for their internet comedy as feature film, please try again.
Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is now out on Peacock in the US and will be released in the UK later this year
