By Kate Wiselogel, Contributor

[Columbia Pictures; 2024]

Rating: 6/10

49 years ago this month, the first episode of Saturday Night Live (SNL) aired. Currently, SNL is in its 50^th season, making it one of the longest running network TV shows ever. SNL has achieved a level of cultural ubiquity that makes it hard to imagine that it was once a show that struggled to get off the ground. In the timely new film Saturday Night, writer and director Jason Reitman rehashes the tumultuous 90 minutes before the first ever episode of SNL. 

Saturday Night features a vast ensemble cast with Gabriel Labelle starring as the show’s creator and producer, Lorne Michaels. Other notable cast members include Rachel Sennott as Rosie Shuster, Dylan O’Brien as Dan Aykroyd and Corey Michael Smith as Chevy Chase.  

Even though most of Saturday Night’s audience is going to go into it already knowing that everything works out in the end, Reitman is still able to create suspense throughout the film. The film uses many long takes and overlapping dialogue. The camera’s intense swiveling around during these longer takes creates a sense of urgency in the audience. The film’s use of a real-time clock to countdown to showtime also contributes to the creation of tension. 

Read more: Movie Review: Joker Folie à Deux 

Perhaps the most disappointing thing about Saturday Night is how underwritten and one-noted some of its characters can feel. It is very easy for the actors tasked with playing legends like Billy Crystal and Andy Kaufman to slip into impersonations as opposed to giving more complex performances. The way that comedian Gilda Radner (played by Ella Hunt) is portrayed is particularly lackluster. Radner is written in a style that rids her of any sort of intentionality that was present in her comedy and instead reduces her to a manic pixie dream girl adjacent character. 

However, the best performance in the film is easily given by Lamorne Morris as Garrett Morris. In his performance, the younger Morris navigates the older Morris’ existential malaise as the first black cast member of a show that has historically struggled with diversity. The younger Morris’ performance seems to carry the weight of all that has and hasn’t changed at SNL since the older Morris’ time on the show. 

In a recent interview with the Los Angeles Times, the younger Morris shared how he was able to relate his experiences as the only black cast member on the sitcom New Girl to the older Morris’ experiences as the sole black cast member in the original SNL cast. Morris’ performance in this film is poignant and when he bursts into song towards the film’s climax, it feels cathartic for both the audience and the performer. To the film’s credit, Saturday Night doesn’t feel like it is overly proud of itself for taking the time to spotlight some of the alienation felt by the women and people of color who were working at SNL at this time.  

Overall, Saturday Night is somewhat of a mixed bag. Some of the film’s best moments include Rachel Sennott’s delayed movie star-esque entrance, Willem Dafoe’s perfectly menacing demeanor as the NBC exec who wants to shut it all down and the re-enactment of the now-famous “Hard Hats” sketch. However, these moments are weighed down by the film’s general mediocrity. 

In many ways, Saturday Night is not that different from its namesake. Like most episodes of SNL, there are flashes of comedic and cinematic genius throughout Saturday Night but as a whole, it is largely pretty forgettable. However, as is true of both SNL in its current iteration and Saturday Night, it takes only a few of those moments of comedic genius to make the general mediocrity of the whole thing easy to forget and, at times, even fun.