Movie Review: Tropic Thunder
By Matthew Huntley
August 22, 2008
BoxOfficeProphets.com
There have been many Hollywood satires targeted at Hollywood and Tropic Thunder doesn't push the envelope much further than (or even as far as) some of its brethren (The Player, State and Main), but it's edgy and funny, sometimes uproarious. By blending action and comedy, the movie gives itself plenty of opportunities to take a lot of jabs. What's refreshing is those being jabbed at don't seem to mind and happily go along with it.
For all its extremities, the movie's set up doesn't seem too farfetched: the stars of a big-budget war picture called Tropic Thunder are placed in the middle of the Vietnam jungle to finish the movie, which, after only five days of shooting, is already a month behind schedule. Millions of dollars have already been spent and the head of the studio, a profane, balding man named Les Grossman (Tom Cruise, nice touch), is threatening to shut it down.
Director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) blames it on the prima donna actors - Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), and Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel). They are an assortment of Hollywood stereotypes, each convincing in their own right. Speedman is the dried up action star, sort of a mix between Tom Cruise and Kurt Russell; Lazarus is a five-time Academy Award winner who gives a whole new meaning to the phrase, "method actor" (he goes so far as to dye his skin black to play an African American); Portnoy is the shameless one-note comedian and drug addict who has garnered fame through flatulence; Chino is a rapper turned actor; and Sandusky, the straight man, is the only one among them without flagrant insecurities.
Cockburn takes the advice of Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), the author of the movie's source novel, and decides to drop them all off in the jungle and shoot the rest of the movie guerrilla style. Cameras are placed in the trees and the actors must follow the script on their own.
The catch: the jungle is a real-life war zone called the Golden Triangle with a real-life drug gang called the Flaming Dragons. In one of the movie's funniest scenes, Cockburn is, well, disassembled and it's hilarious how Speedman continues to believe it's still a setup (listen for the line, "This is blood-flavored.") Only Lazarus believes the situation they're in is real, but Speedman is determined to stick to the script.
Speedman is eventually captured by the Dragons, who torture him into re-enacting his most maligned movie role, the titular character in Simple Jack, about a mentally challenged man who can talk to animals. That the Dragons actually like this movie (a play on I Am Sam) is meant to poke fun at the idea of how foreign audiences sometimes like what Americans consider Hollywood garbage. Speedman, recalling Colonel Kurtz from Apocalypse Now, starts to believe he's home because the Dragons accept him as a good actor. In the meantime, the others use the movie's screenplay to devise a rescue plan.
There are some big laughs in Tropic Thunder, most notably the trailers that start the movie. We see the reasons why these actors have such massive egos - Speedman has starred in a series of redundant action movies, which makes him the highest paid and highest grossing actor of all time, but with limited range; Lazarus only makes serious movies like Satan's Alley, about homosexual monks (the other being Tobey Maguire) trying to keep their urges a secret; and Portnoy stars in The Fatties: Fart II, in which he plays each member of the gassy Fattie family.
All these trailers, of course, are meant to make fun of their real-life Hollywood counterparts like Mission: Impossible, Brokeback Mountain and The Nutty Professor. But Ben Stiller, who directed and co-wrote the movie with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, isn't interested in simply re-enacting those movies; he cares more about showing how Hollywood repeats itself. This strategy isn't anything new to us, but we laugh anyway.
As a movie, Tropic Thunder is a big Hollywood enterprise, which is ironic since that's one of the subjects it set out to makes fun of. Like Scream did for the horror genre, Tropic Thunder knowingly satirizes war movies while simultaneously paying heed to them. By the time it enters its second act, the premise wears thin and I found myself growing tired throughout the sluggish middle section (too much time is spent going back and forth from Speedman to the other actors), but it picks up during the exciting climax.
Tropic Thunder is far from a comedic masterpiece, but it often nails what it sets out to do. It's not just a comedy, but a full-blown action extravaganza, so it works on more than one level. If the movie had trimmed about ten minutes off its runtime, it would have been even tighter. As is, it's funny and an appropriate close to a summer full of movies that will no doubt be spoofed some time down the road.
NOTE: Before its opening, crowds protested Tropic Thunder because of the way it supposedly made fun of mentally retarded people. They would be referring to Simple Jack and the way Stiller and Downey Jr. flippantly use the word "retarded" in a scene when they describe such characters. Let it be known the movie is not making fun of retarded people; it's making fun of how Hollywood tends to portray retarded people and how such roles are only played to win awards. The protestors have taken it the wrong way.