398 - Tropic Thunder review

Ben Stiller’s “Tropic Thunder” plays like a laundry list of Hollywood insider grievances. It’s a scattershot insult leveled at insecure actors, nitwit directors, rappers, closeted stars, insufferable Oscar bait, idiotic movie going trends, inordinate budgets, and the bête noire of the industry, vicious film executives. The film’s reach is long, spirit earnest, and laughs plentiful. But it’s also a victim of complacency, and just barely able to pull itself out of a dive caused by overeagerness.

Stiller (who directed and co-wrote) stars as Tugg Speedman, a failing action star, who besides looking nothing like an action star, becomes lost in the jungles of Vietnam while working on a pretentious, overblown war film designed to revive his flagging career. His last film was “Simple Jack,” a movie about a mentally disabled man that became the biggest joke in town.

The rest of Speedman’s “squad” includes Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), an Australian actor who dyes his skin black and never breaks character, Jeff (Jack Black), a bloated comedian primarily concerned about his heroin supply, and Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a dreadful rapper who lusts after an unexpected pop star. They run across a group of drug dealers, who get a glimpse of the group’s fatigues and rifles and mistake them for DEA agents.

As satire, “Tropic Thunder” often stands at the edge of the sublime, cutting deep into the array of targets lined up for takedown. All but the most culturally illiterate will recognize famous figures and behaviors ridiculed. Downey Jr. puts in an especially good performance as the well-meaning embodiment the puerile vanity that afflicts many top tier actors. Despite keeping largely in character as a Southern black sergeant, he manages to become the film’s soul even though comes in at second place for screen time. Jack Black has but a solitary memorable moment, that sees him suffering heroin withdraw tied to a tree. Stiller populates the film with a number of instantly recognizable cameos, including Matthew McConaughey as a casually jittery agent, Nick Nolte as a crazed, duplicitous author, and one from a megastar that I’ll get back to later.

Alas, Stiller and co., in their haste to spear it all, allow the film to wallow in a self-satisfied smugness in a manner that’s more condescending than likely intended. Satire too often becomes farce, and shaky farce at that. A pic like this needs confidence to work, but it’s gawky when the filmmakers are just certain that they’re working on a piece of genius and forget that they can, in fact, do wrong, much like those big shots they’re spoofing. Considering the Hollywood tendency to pat itself on the back and the film’s hefty surplus of bigwig talent, the satire is pretty fierce, stopping just short of naming names. One could accurately label “Tropic Thunder” the Hollywood insider’s mainstream-oriented attack on Hollywood insiders.

Though the ratio of hits to misses is more than sufficient, the film's shortcomings seem oddly clumsy considering the sharpness of the better scenes. Consider the film's antagonist, a ten-year-old Asian warlord. Why is he a child? Why to get a laugh when Jack Black steps on him, of course. Funny, perhaps, for viewers the warlord’s age. On its own, this sort of thing is simply stupid, but when surrounded by much top rate satire, it's deeply distracting. There’s excess peppered throughout; Speedman has made six films in a bonehead action series while Lazarus has won five Oscars. Cut those numbers down by two each and you have a funny number that doesn’t hit the audience over the head.

A final note: by now, I’m likely not spoiling anything by announcing that Tom Cruise has a peculiar extended cameo, and does a he does a staggeringly funny job, diving into a role so wholly different from his usual screen persona that it could be his most memorable role ever, simply because the others are arduous to tell apart. His presence perhaps ensures that “Tropic Thunder” won’t be remembered as the film where a white method actor dyes himself black or that inspired protests due to jokes about the mentally disabled, but as the one where Tom Cruise goes bald and dances. Instead of another “Mission: Impossible” or popcorn flick, I have to suggest that Cruise try another comedy, lest he feel more comfortable becoming the real-life equivalent of Tugg Speedman.

3 out of 5