MacGruber

Jorma Taccone’s MacGruber (2010) is a comedy (more like a parody of an action movie) about a legendary hero of the US military who moves to Latin America to take a break from his work, after his wife is assassinated by his worst enemy. MacGruber (Will Forte) fakes his own death and hides in Rio Bamba, Ecuador (a fictional city named after Ecuador's real Riobamba). The MIA (a security agency based on the CIA) tracks him down and convinces him to participate in an operation led by his wife’s murderer. He travels to Washington DC and forms a team with agent Piper and an old friend called Vicki.

The plot is built around the character of MacGruber. Considered a legend because of past successes helping the US government in uncountable special operations, MacGruber is depicted as the only hope to stop Dieter Von Cunth (Val Kilmer). However, the ten years he has spent hidden in Ecuador seems to have taken his abilities away. He has become the opposite of a hero: a man whose egocentrism and evident mental issues are reflected in constant failure. Thus, as the plot develops, we realize that the legend of MacGruber is more and more fictitious. He still does his job, albeit rather takes the credit for other’s job, from beginning to end.

Basically, only the second scene of the movie portrays something about Latin America (which adds up to about five minutes of the whole production). In Rio Bamba, we see MacGruber meditating in a small monastery with religious portraits over the walls. The village had been MacGruber’s peaceful refuge for ten years. While the MIA general is trying to convince the hero to join the operation, people from what seems to be an indigenous peasant village walk in the background. However, the clothes the people wear, and the landscapes shown, do not belong to an accurate representation of an Ecuadorean village (still less of the real Riobamba, which is not a village but one of Ecuador's largest cities). The place looks more like something inspired on a Mexican village. But these details do not change what is depicted of Latin America, from its name we know that it is a fictional representation of some poor and hidden village that no one cares about.

Arranging the set in which the scene of Rio Bamba is recorded with Mexican molds gives us an understanding that, on the one hand, the imagination of Americans about Latin America is that everything south of the border looks the same. Or on the other hand, that Americans do not know much about Latin American society or its people (or that learning about them is irrelevant), and that their depictions of Latin America are mostly based on general imaginations of it (often stereotyped assumptions).

What is being depicted in the movie about Ecuador does not tell us anything about the country or Latin America, it is not realistic, but it is not important neither. Indeed, the entire movie was filmed in New Mexico, US. The only reason that this scene is included for MacGruber’s plot is to emphasize that a hero decided to go to a place where he was going to be difficult to find. Why would someone go to that village with houses made of dry mud, dirt streets and no electricity? An American hero was there and that made that place interesting enough to travel to.