Like many movies these days, Tropic Thunder starts with a few previews. One is an advertisement for an energy drink called “Booty Sweat,” another is for a belligerent action movie called Scorcher (so good that it commanded five sequels), then there’s a low-brow comedy about hugely fat people that communicate entirely through flatulence (lampooning those intolerable and endless endurance tests where Eddie Murphy or Martin Lawrence star as every character in the movie), and finally a religious drama involving homosexual priests. The soundtrack, of course, is by Enigma.
Tropic Thunder is so overflowing with farcical ideas that they had to include a few theatrical trailers just to get the ideas in there, and what follows is exactly the kind of movie that you would expect to exist in a world that featured such previews.
The story is about three Hollywood movie stars making a dramatic Vietnam film together. Jack Black is the drug addicted Jeff Portnoy, Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, the token blackface guy, and Ben Stiller plays the curiously named Tugg Speedman, an overrated actor hoping to save his suffering career with this latest cheesy war movie.
The movie starts with a scene on the set of the movie within the movie, including one of the movie’s two spoofs of Willem Dafoe’s frightening death in Platoon (a tasteless joke that is one of Tropic Thunder’s few blunders). Mortally wounded, Tugg is given the obligatory dying words speech where he gets to finally tell Lazarus his true feelings. Unable to get the words out, he calls for a cut. The director wants to keep rolling, Lazarus is getting irritated, and in the ensuing confusion, the pyrotechnics guy (Danny McBride, stealing the show again) accidentally wastes a $4 million explosion. Given that the Director, the also curiously named Damien Cockburn, managed to fall a full month behind schedule within the first five days of shooting, his producer is unimpressed.
Enter Tom Cruise. Oh. My. God. YES.
Cruise plays Les Grossman, a big shot Hollywood producer with no fuse. Lately I have been of the opinion that Cruise’s acting career was in genuinely dire straits, given his bizarre behavior in his personal life, but this movie restored my faith in him 100%, he is absolutely brilliant in this movie. He is one of the most watchable characters in the film, even though he is meant to be such an unsightly presence. Someone should win a make-up award just for what they did to his hands!
Our heroes almost lose their lives because they think they're making a movie.
Cockburn’s last chance to save his movie is to take all of these actors out into the real jungle and get real performances out of them. This is where the movie takes a turn down familiar roads. Charlie Chaplin was poking fun at his own craft as far back as 1914 with a charming little comedy called Film Johnnie, and then again in 1916 with Behind the Screen, and we’ve all seen The Three Amigos, which is almost the same movie as Tropic Thunder. So the idea of endangered movie stars unaware that they’re in a real-life situation is not exactly new and original.
But, strangely for an action/spoof/comedy, Tropic Thunder is an actor’s movie and a writer’s movie. The script is loaded with gems and homages that manage to generate laughs without being belligerently perverse and tasteless like the Scary Movies etc.
Our heroes almost lose their lives because they think they're making a movie.
It’s the spoof style where the audience will be straining their eyes and ears to recognize each in-joke in the movie, rather than the “style” where you just photocopy another movie and add stupid sex jokes.
Ben Stiller deserves enormous credit for his part in the writing and directing, although his performance is one of the only real let-downs in the film. He goes through the motions of his limited repertoire, giving us essentially the exact performance he has played so many times before. It’s Zoolander in Vietnam.
Thankfully, Jack Black goes to town with his role. It’s clear that he was having a blast making the movie, and it’s hard not to join him. But the real show-stopper is Robert Downey Jr, who is so brilliant as the white Australian actor in blackface (the movie’s most famous Hollywood jab) that I found myself hoping for a spinoff sequel for his character.
There has been a lot of publicity about the protests that Tropic Thunder generated at it’s Los Angeles world premiere because of it’s use of the word “retard.”
"Never go full-retard!"
More than once, and in true Zoolander fashion, Speedman gets into a deep conversation about how to most efficiently perfect his acting style. Robert Downey Jr. steals every scene, it is CLASSIC.
Once in the jungle, the cast gradually realize the reality of their situation, as they become inadvertently involved with a deadly drug ring. We don’t learn much about them and they are a confusing bunch, since they are located in Vietnam but look Korean and speak broken Chinese, and they’re led by a little kid.
And what a little kid, man. Holy crap. This kid is like a cross between that child emperor from Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom and, say, a Tazmanian devil. Oh, and he has lots of guns and a war face that would make Stonewall Jackson cringe. You may find yourself wondering where they found this prodigal psycho-killer. Well, ladies and gentlemen, a quick glance at his miniscule filmography will solve that little puzzle. Sesame Street!!
Matthew McConaughey, proud owner of the most difficult last name in Hollywood, has a meaningless bit part as Speedman’s airy agent. I don’t expect brilliant character depth in a movie like this, but his character is just too obviously thrown in as shock value, which the movie surely doesn’t need. He is unconcerned, for example, when Speedman calls him, afraid for his life, but flies into an uncontrollable rage when he learns that his client is without access to a working Tivo machine. What the hell?
Then again, Tivo plays a pivotal role in the final act of the film, and not just as product placement, of which Tropic Thunder has prodigious amounts, and which it also lambasts along with a whole slew of other b-movie cliches.
Tropic Thunder has the funniest beginning to any movie that I’ve seen in recent memory, and also the funniest ending. I wanted to cheer as the movie opened, and I left the same way. It’s a comedy the likes of which rarely comes along. Pineapple Express is another similarly outstanding comedy currently in theaters, I recommend that you don’t miss either of them!
GET SOME!!
