Tropic Thunder (2008)
Directed by Ben Stiller
Written by Ben Stiller Justin Theroux, Etan Cohen
Starring Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr, Steve Coogan, Jack Black, Nick Nolte, Danny McBride
Release Date August 13th, 2008
Published August 12th, 2008
Ben Stiller may seem all mild mannered and inoffensive but he has a rather pronounced dark side when he wants to. It came out when he played Jerry Stahl in Permanent Midnight. And that dark side was unfortunately on display in his ugly direction of The Cable Guy. But it is not until now, with the release of the savage Hollywood parody Tropic Thunder that we finally see Stiller at his darkest. Sending up full of themselves actors, greedy agents, and maniacal studio heads, Stiller pulls no punches and lands frequent, hilarious, body blows.
In Tropic Thunder Ben Stiller writes, directs and even stars as action movie legend Tugg Speedman. The star of the over-ripe action series Scorcher, Tugg's star is fading and he is craving the respect that only Oscar can bring. That is why he chose to star in Simple Jack, the story of a severely mentally challenged farm worker. The role was universally derided.
Speedman was lucky to land a role in Tropic Thunder a Vietnam book adaptation with an all star cast and Oscar written all over it. Sort of. The film has the gravitas of a Vietnam story but it also has a first time director (Steve Coogan), an inexperienced crew, and an out of control budget. And then there are his co-stars.
Jeff Portnoy is the star of the comedy franchise The Fatties in which he plays every character and every joke is a fart joke. Portnoy also happens to have a wicked heroin addiction to complete the package. Kirk Lazarus is a completely different kind of problem child. A multiple Oscar-Emmy-Golden Globe award winner, Lazarus is legendary for immersing himself so deeply in a role that he loses himself.
Once, after portraying astronaut Neil Armstrong, he was found in dumpster attempting to fly it to the moon. For Tropic Thunder Lazarus has undergone a medical procedure to dye his skin so he can play an African American Sgt. The cast is rounded out by a rapper named Alpa Chino (Brandon Jackson, read the name again if you didn't get it the first time), and a first time actor named Kevin (JayBaruchel).
Together the cast is such a pain in the ass that the director finally decides he has to change the whole production. At the urging of the writer of the book, a nutball vet nicknamed Four Leaf (Nick Nolte, in full Nick Nolte mode), the director is taking the cast into the real jungles of Vietnam where they will shoot the movie guerilla style with handheld and hidden cameras with real explosions, provided by an inexperienced tech guy (Danny McBride) with an itchy trigger finger.
Unfortunately, not long after arriving in the jungle, the director goes missing and the cast is engaged by real life inhabitants of this jungle setting, drug smugglers who mistake them for DEA agents. Now the cast is involved in a real war only they don't know it.
Ben Stiller tapped out the script for Tropic Thunder with his pal Justin Theroux and they hold back nothing in demonstrating the self involved nature of most actors, directors and studio people. The studio head in Tropic Thunder is an especially delicious parody, of whom only Stiller and Theroux know for sure. Played by an unrecognizable Tom Cruise, the studio head is a maniac with a penchant for Diet Coke and hip hop dancing.
Cruise has never been this unrestrained and balls out hilarious. He bites into this role with the same verve and vitriol that he brought to his misogynists' guru in 1999's Magnolia and it's a contest to tell which character required more swearing.
Tropic Thunder is loud, violent, stupid and offensive. It's also, arguably, the funniest movie of 2008. If you can put aside the controversies, you are going to laugh a lot at this most deserving beatdown of Hollywood imagemakers. There are jokes in Tropic Thunder that are intended to make you uncomfortable or even angry and yet, you often can't help but laugh at just how outland and bold these jokes are. I don't want to here the R-word slur toward the mentally handicapped but it is hard to deny, in the context of Tropic Thunder, it's use apt and very, very funny. I'm deeply ashamed at laughing as hard as I did, but I did laugh.
As for Robert Downey in blackface... well..... I was sure this would be the most controversial element of Tropic Thunder. Fortunately, Stiller and Theroux do try to defuse the situation with Brandon Jackson's Alpa Chino character calling out the blatant and disgusting racism at play. Meanwhile, Downey Jr himself does well to make sure Kurt Lazarus has few redeeming qualities, he's clearly a terrible person. The movie is hard on Hollywood by being hard on these characters who represent elements of the Hollywood in need of a serious punch in the gut. Downey's shots at the pretentious Method Actor, are terrifically, savagely funny.
Delivering unto the Hollywood elite the smackdown they so desperately deserve, Tropic Thunder is the rare Hollywood satire to throw punches and actually land a few. The public generally isn't interested in Hollywood talking about itself, even when it is being self critical, but with Tropic Thunder comes a Hollywood self examination that comes with big laughs that don't require you to have read obscure tomes about Hollywood legends and bastards.
