Please Don't Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain (15)

Ben works with his best buddies John and Martin at an outdoor goods store owned by his father Farley. The trio have simple dreams until a social media post reveals that a compass they found many years ago could be the missing link to unearthing a bust of Marie Antoinette with an estimated worth of 100 million US dollars. Fizzing with excitement, Ben, John and Martin head for the untamed wilderness of Foggy Mountain State Park to discover if the legend is true.

LondonNet Film Review

Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain (15) Film Review from LondonNet

New York City-based comedy troupe Please Don’t Destroy, aka Martin Herlihy, John Higgins and Ben Marshall, began performing together at university and the trio joined the writing team of Saturday Night Live in 2021, building on the popularity of digital shorts posted during the Covid lockdowns. Their irreverent humour yields frustratingly hit-or-miss returns in a gung-ho outdoor adventure about childhood friends on the hunt for a priceless artefact, directed by SNL alumnus Paul Briganti. Belly laughs are harder to find than the buried bounty in Herlihy, Higgins and Marshall’s scatty script, which pinballs between father-son angst, aerial acrobatics in wingsuits, adult baptism, pungent flatulence and close encounters with a rapacious wild hawk…

Narrated by a delightfully droll John Goodman (for no obvious reason), Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain boasts a couple of decent one-liners and a sweetly sincere yet slight romantic subplot. However, a lot of gags don’t land comfortably, if at all, and a gifted supporting ensemble including Bowen Yang, Conan O’Brien and Stranger Things star Gaten Matarazzo (playing himself) are poorly served. Winning rapport between the endearingly goofy central trio casts a warm glow but Briganti’s picture won’t be earning its fire-starting wilderness badge with just a couple of bright sparks.

Ben Patterson (Marshall) is a directionless 26-year-old, who lives with childhood pals John (Higgins) and Martin (Herlihy) and all three work at the Trout Plus outdoor goods emporium run by Ben’s overbearing father, Farley (O’Brien). “I only care about two things in the world: money and power. And you have neither,” Farley disparages his son. A random social media post intimates that an old compass, which Ben, John and Martin found in a creek as children, could be the missing link to discovering a bust of Marie Antoinette stolen by French naval officer Jean Pierre Le Roche (Rick Espaillat) worth an estimated 100 million US dollars.

Ben resolves to earn his father’s respect by unearthing the booty with his buddies. The hapless trio venture into Foggy Mountain State Park to etch their names into the history books. En route, Ben, John and Martin clash with local wildlife, flirt with park rangers Lisa (Megan Stalter) and Taylor (X Mayo) and antagonise an anti-capitalist cult led by missing local man Deetch Nordwind (Yang).

Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure Of Foggy Mountain is a series of offbeat skits, loosely tethered to a perfunctory tale of enduring friendship in the great outdoors. Herlihy, Higgins and Marshall occasionally strike gold – the punchline to a disastrous children’s talent show is glorious – but for most of the 92 minutes, their comedy prospecting comes up empty-handed.

– Kim Hu