Tropic Thunder (2008)

Tropic Thunder

2008, USA

Ben Stiller

Capping off the 2008 summer movie season is Ben Stiller's meta-action-comedy Tropic Thunder, a film so backlogged with big names, movie references and Hollywood in-jokes that you'll spend its first 15 minutes with your head spinning. By the time the movie finally settles down a bit, however, it manages to find a surprisingly agreeable comic groove, skewering nearly every facet of Hollywood filmmaking – both contemporary and historical.

The plot is actually set in motion before the film begins, with a set of fake trailers and commercials establishing the film-within-a-film's major players: Stiller's Tugg Speedman, an over-the-hill action star who made an ill-advised foray into the realm of prestige film; Jack Black's Jeff Portnoy, a self-centered drug addict with a series of obnoxious Eddie Murphy-style fat-suit comedies behind his belt; Brandon T. Johnson's Alpa Chino, an energy-drink magnate; and, most memorably, Robert Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus, a self-serious Aussie method actor. They're all filming Tropic Thunder, a massive-scale war film directed by a novice (Steve Coogan, in what amounts to a blown-up cameo), based on a memoir written by a loony hook-handed war vet (Nick Nolte, in hobo mode), alongside an eager young actor named Kevin (Jay Baruchel). There's also Pineapple Express' Danny McBride and Bill Hader as, respectively, as an explosives expert and a studio exec.

Robert Downey Jr. may as well be Capn' Save-a-Blockbuster. After rescuing Iron Man from being a completely run-of-the-mill comic book movie, he single-handedly fashions the year's greatest comic creation as Lazarus. In a delightful skewering of hardcore method types like Christian Bale or Nicholas Cage circa Leaving Las Vegas, Lazarus opts for cosmetic surgery to blacken his skin in order to play an African-American character named Sgt. Osiris. Downey adopts an over-the-top caricature of "black" speech and mannerisms, much to the continual chagrin of actual black person Johnson (who plays brilliantly off of Downey's exaggerations, exuding both amusement and bemusement). It's an over-the-top concept that Downey somehow manages to pull off – mainly by communicating Lazarus' innate need to be obnoxiously, relentlessly method in his methods. "I never break character 'till I do the DVD commentary."

The blackface device is indicative of the movie's preoccupation with Hollywood's systemic racism, xenophobia and PC hypocrisy. When the actors find themselves stranded in the Vietnam wilderness and come upon a band of sinister Burmese heroin producers, nearly every old trope of Generic Primitive/Asian Otherness is trotted out, from the "outsider white man praised as deity" chestnut (here replaced with an amusingly irreverent sequence in which Stiller's Speedman dons whiteface and reprises a generally-reviled older character), to the respected child leader (see Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom) to the muddled use of language (the Burmese thugs don't bat an eye at Lazarus' use of Chinese) and even the PC location choice – it's the same tyranny-choked region that Stallone decimated in Rambo last year. Stiller also employs music, editing and plot cues straight out of Apocalypse Now (whose troubled filming history was certainly an inspiration), Forrest Gump (Buffalo Springfield's "That's What It's Worth") and, memorably, Saving Private Ryan's famed Omaha Beach sequence.

For all of the movie's incisive commentary on Hollywood's purity complexes (also lampooned in Lazarus' thorough explanation of the Academy's "retard rules") there are a number of elements that simply don't work. Black's Portnoy is supposed to evoke past troubled, rotund funnymen like John Candy and John Belushi, but never communicates anything beyond shallow drug-jonesing. The subplots involving Stiller's agent and studio head – played by a pair of a-listers I won't spoil – are tedious and unfunny. One of those big names is most certainly in the film in an excessive attempt at saving face after some recent embarrassments, including the use of a fat suit, and it comes across a little too clearly. All of those elements – including Black's character - could easily have been removed from the script and taken the film from its somewhat overstretched 107 minutes down to a more manageable ninety. Luckily, McBride, Coogan, Nolte and Baruchel all deliver fine, funny performances to help flesh out the interstitial scenes between big action setpieces, making the film more coherent than it has to be. That other recent exotically-titled two-word action-comedy might have a higher batting average, but Tropic Thunder logs in about ten times the pitches, and in its tireless efforts to entertain produces Hollywood's funniest film since Forgetting Sarah Marshall.

Simon Howell