The Please Don’t Destroy Movie Is a Workaholics Episode in Disguise
For Workaholics fans bummed that their movie got canceled, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is a good-enough substitute.
A brunette with body issues, an over-six-footer desperate to please his dad, and their weirdo friend with lusciously curly locks worry that they’re growing apart. They’ve been inseparable since college, but years past graduation, their priorities are changing. Maybe they should care more about their careers, or about falling in love, or about living up to society’s expectations for young white men who have full heads of hair. They’ll have one last adventure together, and then they’ll get serious about growing up. Or maybe they don’t. Isn’t it more fun if they don’t?
That’s the plot of the Please Don’t Destroy movie, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, in which Saturday Night Live guys John Higgins, Ben Marshall, and Martin Herlihy make the jump to the big screen. (Or to streaming, since the movie abandoned its initial theatrical plans and is now exclusively on Peacock.) But it’s also basically the plot of all seven seasons of Workaholics, the Comedy Central series co-created, intermittently written and directed by, and starring Adam DeVine, Anders Holm, and Blake Anderson. (Presumably, their canceled-at-Paramount+ movie would have had the same idea.) That the two end up feeling similar wasn’t exactly predictable. Although Higgins, Marshall, and Herlihy riff on Workaholics-friendly topics in their digital shorts like millennial myopia, their absurd scenarios are more about elevating the intensity of misunderstandings and ratcheting up untenable anxiety than the tedium of office culture. In contrast, by virtue of being on cable and aiming for a more niche audience, the Comedy Central series was grimier, more vulgar, and more burnout-specific than the PDD shorts ever are.
The Treasure of Foggy Mountain, though, essentially operates as a superlong Workaholics episode by transplanting DeVine, Holm, and Anderson’s characters and personas onto Higgins, Marshall, and Herlihy, and evoking specific Workaholics plots and arcs in the film. Higgins’s John worries he’s getting fat, his friends are outgrowing him, and he’ll never fall in love, so he suggests a trip to Foggy Mountain, where they had a formative childhood experience, to bring them back together; in Workaholics, Adam calls his body a monstrosity in “Three and a Half Men,” leads the friends-must-have-fun charge at a beachside time-share in “Monstalibooyah” and during a Thanksgiving vacation trip in “6 Hours Till Hedonism II,” and finally gets his first girlfriend — at the expense of his friends — in “Wedding Thrashers.” Marshall’s Ben wants to impress his demanding dad (Conan O’Brien, the film’s best casting coup), wishes he were more traditionally masculine, and is wrongly convinced of his own business acumen; Ders lies to his dad about his professional success by squatting in a nicer house in the neighborhood in “The Meat Jerking Beef Boys,” attacks his roommates and their manliness in “The Promotion,” and struggles to distinguish himself to his boss (with a series of bad ideas) during “The Business Trip.” And Herlihy’s Martin is the human non sequitur with the most disparate traits, like a fondness for ostentatious outfits, a girlfriend he wants to keep away from his friends, and a different personality when he parties too hard. Blake was just as random with his bear suit in “We Be Ballin’,” he hides his online girlfriend from Adam and Ders in “Gone Catfishing,” and he adopts an ostentatious cool-dude persona after an energy-drink company starts paying the roommates to party in “Party Gawdz.”
In Foggy Mountain, the trio’s strained friendship is put to the test when they decide to try and find a local legend: a bust statue of Marie Antoinette that is said to be worth millions and was supposedly lost in the area by a French explorer. The last person who tried to find it, Deetch Nordwind (Bowen Yang), has been missing for ten years, and the film follows John, Ben, and Martin as they cross paths with Deetch, who has set up his own isolated community on the mountain. As a whole, The Treasure of Foggy Mountain doesn’t quite cohere. Yang’s cult feels transported from Yellowjackets, lavender outfits and all, rather than an organic piece of the film, and the last half-hour centering his group drags, which isn’t great given that the film is only 90 or so minutes long. But nearly every scene offers a Workaholics-like element that is either joyously silly, ludicrously stupid, or both. The roommates sing together, do little choreographed dances, and resort to drastic survival measures when they get lost in the woods; they reject responsibility at every turn while affirming their love for each other. The Workaholics nostalgia is easy to sink back into, but the flip side of that enjoyment is that you’ll finish The Treasure of Foggy Mountain missing Maribeth Monroe, Jillian Bell, and Erik Griffin. (Don’t worry about Kyle Newacheck; he’s a co–executive producer and recurring director on What We Do in the Shadows.)
Of course, without asking Please Don’t Destroy, it’s impossible to know whether they were intentionally alluding to Workaholics. Maybe three-member troupes naturally fall into a certain kind of comedic organization that seems repetitive, or maybe 20-something white guys all have the same concerns about their personal and professional lives. But it also doesn’t feel totally out of the question to imagine that Higgins, Marshall, and Herlihy watched Workaholics during their high-school and college years, and subconsciously mimicked its rhythms and dynamics when writing their first feature film. And if they consider putting a spin on their Please Don’t Destroy future-selves sketch with an alternate-selves version, well, they’ve got casting options.
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