Saturday Night (2024) review

It's ninety minutes prior to the debut of a "comedy program" called Saturday Night and Canadian-born producer/writer Lorne Michaels (Gabriel LaBelle) has to contend with numerous issues: censor Joan (Catherine Curtin) wants to "clean up" the language, the set isn't finished, NBC executive David Tebet (Willem Dafoe) is skeptical the show will work out, Lorne can't decide how to cut it down to a reasonable length, and so on ... but at 11:30 PM they go live, and the rest is history.  Reitman's cameras are busy as they swoop around frantic characters, but it's never clear what the fuss is about and the tone is completely smug, with the likes of Chevy Chase (Cory Michael Smith), Dan Aykroyd (Dylan O'Brien) and Gilda Radner (Ella Hunt) acting like over-stimulated theatre kids.  I'll admit that SNL has become a "cultural landmark" in a way, but mostly because of its duration (and the innate talent of a couple of its members), since the hit-to-miss ratio of its sketches over the decades has been wildly unbalanced, with significantly more duds than memorable bits.  Early in the feature, Michaels claims that his baby is "absurd and defiant, avant-garde and blue collar" ... but lately the most laughs it tends to get is when anyone breaks character, there's a screw-up or Michael Che and Colin Jost write racially-charged jokes for each other to tell on the "Weekend Update" segment.