Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain

Three man-babies find themselves and their friendship at a sudden crossroads as adulthood looms. Desperate to reforge their long-held bonds, they decide to set off to the local mountain for a weekend of camping and treasure-hunting, leading to a wild adventure where they must face hairless bears, park rangers, and a purple-clad cult of hippies and their treasure-loving leader, and along the way, they learn a little bit about themselves… and each other.

Narrated by John Goodman, Please Don’t Destroy: The Treasure of Foggy Mountain centers on the pretty familiar story of an immature weirdo who needs to start growing up and stop being a weirdo, with the notable exception here being that instead of one immature weirdo, there’s three of them.

John Higgins is the guy who worries that his best friends since childhood will leave him behind in their new lives. Martin Herlihy seems to be ditching his friends for his evangelical girlfriend’s creepy church life. Ben Marshall wants to be an business man, with his Hair Salon for young boys idea, and impress his dad—played by the best part of the film, Conan O’Brien—who owns the Trout Plus superstore where the three arrested-development poster children “work.”

The trio all live in a town that sits at the base of a nearby mountain. It’s a mountain whose heights are shrouded in a legend that says a golden bust of Marie Antoinette, worth millions of dollars, was hidden somewhere upon its slopes. According to the legend, the frenchman who hid the bust had a golden compass that pointed the way to the treasure, and that he hid that compass somewhere nearby.

Years ago, the three friends unknowingly found that compass.

Accidentally stumbling on the fact that the compass is the key to the treasure while searching TikTok for twerking videos late one night, our heroes head off into a series of various comedic misadventures that are kind of funny, but eventually begin to pile up and stumble all over themselves, until the film drags itself to its long overdue ending, after a final act that seems more like an obligation than a climax.

There’s lots of funny people in this film. Tons. The film is packed with funny people. In fact, most of the comedy comes from the small interactions between a bunch of veteran Improv goofballs. And it’s always a pleasure to see Bowen Yang show up in something, but the fact that the film criminally underuses “Turn Down For What” dancer/actress/comedian Sunita Mani is pretty much unforgivable.

Anyway, just to clarify… Please Don’t Destroy is the name of a sketch comedy troupe in the same vein as Derrick Comedy and The Lonely Island, made up of the three main actors, all of whom are currently writers for Saturday Night Live. The Treasure of Foggy Mountain is the title of their first movie.

To be extra clear… it’s no Hot Rod.

Mostly because it’s just too long. It feels like there’s a funny short film in here, but there isn’t enough meat on the bones to justify the length, a common problem with sketch artists doing feature length films. This is not one of the worst SNL films, but it’s definitely not one of the best ones either.