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Ben Stiller, Tropic Thunder

by Kathryn Durfee
08/30/2008

With Tropic Thunder, actor Ben Stiller reprises a role he hasn't played since 2001: director. Having conquered the comic world of male models with his last hit Zoolander, Stiller turns to poke fun at the industry responsible for his own fame. Though Tropic Thunder isn't as zany or quotable as Zoolander, it's an accessible comedy about the movie business that boasts an all-star cast and proves undeniably entertaining. Plus, it just may have saved Tom Cruise's career.

Films about Hollywood are risky undertakings since it is all too easy to fall into the trap of making your film difficult to understand for outsiders. Barry Levinson's "What Just Happened?" failed to connect with audiences at both the Sundance and Cannes Film Festival this year. Tropic Thunder, thankfully, is more concerned with making us laugh than really getting under Hollywood's skin.Tropic Thunder, the comic version of Hearts of Darkness, the documentary about the seemingly endless troubles encountered in the Vietnam jungle by the cast and crew of "Apocalypse Now," satirizes actors and acting, agents and studio execs, writers, trailers and the entire Hollywood machine.

Viewers are introduced to these star caricatures through promos and trailers for their own ridiculous products: rapper Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Johnson) promotes his "Booty Sweat" energy drink and "Bust-A-Nut" candy bar while singing his hit single "I Love Tha' Pussy". Action star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is featured in a trailer for his latest film, Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown; clips from the previous five Scorcher movies are so repetitive that even the voice-over guy for the trailer seems skeptical. Comic actor Jeff "Fatty" Portnoy (Jack Black) appears playing the entire cast of his flatulent franchise The Fatties: Fart 2 Eddie Murphy-style. Finally Australian actor and five-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is introduced in a trailer for Satan's Alley, depicting two monks (the other played by Tobey Maguire) who begin a passionate but sinful affair.

These pop culture symbols come together under director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), who is so far unsuccessfully adapting John "Four Leaf" Tayback's (Nick Nolte) Vietnam war memoir Tropic Thunder. Speedman, Lazarus, Chino and Portnoy, along with young character actor Sandusky (Jay Baruchel) star as the central platoon. To portray his character Sgt. Osiris, an African American, Lazarus has undergone a procedure to darken his skin, and he refuses to break out of character until "after the DVD commentary is recorded," which is causing problems with his co-stars and interfering with production.

After the set explosives guy (Danny McBride) mistakes one of the director's tantrums for the go-ahead on a series of expensive explosions and thus loses the production both time and money (not to mention some of their set and location), Cockburn decides (upon Four Leaf's suggestion) to take his actors deep into the jungle and film the movie guerilla-style. Cockburn doesn't last too long out there, leaving his cast on their own. To make things more difficult, the men are immediately mistaken for DEA agents by the Flaming Dragons, a heroin-producing gang. However, the actors are so unaware of reality and a world in which cell phones and personal assistants don't exist that they fail to realize that they're no longer making a movie.

Written by Justin Theroux, Stiller, and Etan Cohen (not Ethan), Tropic Thunder makes use of first-hand knowledge of shooting on location, taking the liberty of spinning situations wildly out of control for maximum comic effect that entertains without going too far (well, at least not all the time). Just look at the way director Cockburn exits, which I'm sure illustrates how some actors feel about their directors, even if the way Speedman handles it turns your stomach. This scene, one of many, plays off of the writers' near-perfect blend of raunch and clever satire, showing Stiller's devil-may-care attitude that may result in the film offending the people who would most appreciate it. Out in the jungle, no one is safe, not even the mentally-challenged.

Matthew McConaughey makes an appearance as Rick "the Pecker" Peck, Speedman's agent, a man more concerned with getting his client hooked up with TiVo in the jungle than anything else, and an overweight and balding Tom Cruise nearly steals the show as sleezy and insane Hollywood producer Lee Grossman, who swigs Diet Coke and screams obscenities at his poor assistant and is prepared to let actors die if it means the movie will make more money. When the final product wins multiple Oscars, Grossman performs a hip-hop dance that more than compensates for Cruise's previous couch-hopping tendencies. He's still crazy, but at least he's found a way to mold his insanity into something both watchable and commercially successful.

The real show-stopper here is Downey Jr, who is on double-duty here with both Lazarus' Australian twang and Oscar count that nod to Russell Crowe and Osiris' dark skin and ghetto mannerisms that ridicule the extent to which some actors will go to get into character. One of the funniest and most memorable sequences of the film finds Lazarus (as Osiris) explaining the pitfalls of an actor going "full retard" for a role to a downtrodden Speedman, who tried for an Oscar nom with an I Am Sam-style film Simple Jack that only added to his count of box office failures. It's been a great year for Downey Jr so far with both Tropic Thunder and this summer's earlier box-office smash hit Iron Man proving that the actor is back, and in a big way.

Audiences going into Tropic Thunder must be prepared for anything. But then again, would you expect any less from throwing Stiller, Black, and Downey Jr into the jungle together? There's no way around it, the film is offensive. But it seems that in today's world, the most popular humor comes from the most offensive material. Perhaps one day, Hollywood will drift back towards the intellectual comedy, but it certainly won't be this summer.