Rent Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (2023)

Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain (aka Please Don't Destroy: Mascothood) review by Mark McPherson - Cinema Paradiso

A certain level of earnestness must be reached for dumb comedy to be funny. There has to be a willingness to go along with the most absurd gags and premise to sell the laughs. Gene Wilder spoke about how a source of his inspiration was Charlie Chaplin, noting how much faith the actor had in a scene that was funny and that he didn’t need to try extra hard to be more amusing than the scene demanded. That faith is undoubtedly present in Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, a comedy adventure that requires that level of head-first faith in the funny to make it an amusing picture.

The comedy troupe of Martin Herlihy, John Higgins, and Ben Marshall (aka Please Don’t Destroy) have an energy not unlike The Lonely Island or The Whitest Kids U Know. They play up their relatable roles as childhood friends Ben, John, and Martin, who never immensely grew up. They exist in a suburban paradise of their own making, where wasting their days away as employees at an outdoor sports retailer is all they could desire. Their bigger ambitions seem to be far in the distance, where Ben’s idea to add a boys’ salon to the store is too weird for his scrutinizing boss/father (Conan O'Brien). Martin may be getting married, but his religious girlfriend presents some far stranger hills to conquer before reaching that mountain of matrimony. Poor John, however, doesn’t have much to look forward to in his life and feels that his friends will pass him by in the blink of an eye.

The three friends come together when they stumble upon the legendary missing treasure of Foggy Mountain: a bust of Marie Antoinette said to be worth millions of dollars. Their quest leads them through Foggy Mountain State Park, where they encounter odd obstacles. Sometimes it's in the form of uncertain allies with down-on-their-luck park rangers (Megan Stalter, X Mayo) that fluctuate between wanting the treasure and wanting some ass. Sometimes, they run across a cult led by a wildcard leader (Bowen Yang), which is one greedy venture away from dropping the act. And sometimes they’ll just run into really mean animals, like birds who stalk them and a violent critter guarding the treasure’s secret location.

A premise like this could easily fall apart. The friends could be very bland depictions of twenty-something dolts, the boss could be a tiresome slog of Boomer-humor meanderings, and the slapstick could become a tiresome crutch for this story of venturing into tombs and fighting over treasure. But the willingness to be dumb makes this film work so well. There’s never a winking moment at the camera to let the audience in on the joke. There’s faith that those watching will pick up on the idea of the central trio being so pathetic that underage kids bully them into buying beer. Most of the dialogue tries to evoke humor from the writing alone, where all the actors have to do is charge ahead with a straight face. The best ways to make this idea funny are evoked with a lack of fear, and there was always a smile on my face throughout.

The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is a strong first film for the Please Don’t Destroy comedy troupe. The right blend of humor makes this movie such a treat, where there’s a willingness to not only mock the cameo of Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo but even kill him off. It doesn’t just cast John Goodman as the narrator, but gives him such beautifully meta lines as “I was in The Big Lebowski and whole bunch of other sh*t.” There’s something so admirable about a film that wants to have that level of fun, but never become so drowned in the overt that it loses its appeal. It’s just a damn funny film about friends finding treasure and getting into chaos along the way, letting the chaos refreshingly carry the comedy.