Every Movie Based On A Saturday Night Live Sketch - Ranked From Worst To Best

10. Stuart Saves His Family

Tame. Pleasant. Non-threatening. Hopelessly optimistic. These are all words one might use to describe the ineffectual motivational speaker SNL audiences learned to love in the early 90s. Daily Affirmations With Stuart Smalley was the kind of gentle, insightful character piece that SNL rarely tried, and the man behind the mask, Al Franken, should be credited with the outside-the-box hit character. But he should also take a portion of the blame for the underwhelming results of 1995's Stuart Saves His Family, which Franken wrote. Especially since it seems he purposely left out any of the yucks moviegoers were expecting. The initial premise of the Stuart movie is a promising one: Stuart must use his relentless cheer and insufferable psychobabble to save his dysfunctional family. It not only allows us the chance to see the environment Stuart was raised in (securing the backstory of someone who self-helped his way out of a broken home), but it also gives Franken the chance to work in his airtight one-liners ("When it comes to partying, no one gets down like people in recovery"). Unfortunately, this is all played out much more dramatically than any SNL movie should, turning into a relentless bummer at around the third act. (His dad's alcoholism, in particular, is entirely without levity.) And it's not that a character like this can't have a few maudlin moments, it's that you can't take such a sudden, drastic detour with such a familiar, upbeat character and not expect a whole lot of awkwardness.