Bearing a title straight from Andy Sidaris and a cast of gargantuan comedic potential, Tropic Thunder is a parody of Hollywood action films that also makes light of Hollywood’s movie-making and celebrity-building machinations as well.
When director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) cannot control the prima donna cast of his vastly over budget Vietnam war film, he decides to send them into the jungle — away from their assistants and entourages — to film them “guerilla style.” Having rigged up remote-controlled cameras and heavy explosives, Damien, along with the five members of his cast, is dropped by helicopter into the middle of a Vietnamese jungle. After explaining how he intends to film the rest of the movie, Damien steps on a landmine and is killed, leaving the cast alone, armed with only blank-firing weapons, and surrounded by the army of a drug lord. The problem is that the actors think that Damien’s death was a special effect and the ambushing army is part of the action. Clueless, they keep hamming it up for the remote cameras hoping to make the best war movie of all time.
The actors include Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), a washed-up action hero; Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), an Australian five-time Academy Award winner who has surgically altered himself to look black; Jeff “Fats” Portnow (Jack Black), a drug-addicted slapstick comedy star, Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a rapper turned actor, and Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), the only actor who actually attended rehearsals and the cast’s military-style “boot camp.”
For everything it gets right, Tropic Thunder does four things wrong. The script, written by Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, can’t stay focused. Instead of simply trying to satirize action films or war films, Tropic Thunder goes after Hollywood as a whole. If the jokes were more consistently on-the-mark, this might have worked. The opening of the movie is simply brilliant as we see the various actors’ other projects via coming attractions previews. The previews are spot-on and I’m sure they fooled more than a few people when the film played in theaters this past summer. But, in contrast, the movie features some wildly off-the-mark sequences too, including a sequence where Tugg Speedman ventures into the jungle alone, kills an animal out of fear, and then wears its skin like a warrior for no apparent reason.
Robert Downey Jr. steals the show as Kirk Lazarus playing Lincoln Osiris, the African-American soldier. Lazarus is the ultimate method actor and he can’t get out of character. The verbal sparring matches that Lazarus and Brandon T. Jackson’s Alpa Chino get into regarding the way Lazarus plays a black man are priceless.
Don’t get me wrong. Tropic Thunder is funny, but I can’t help feeling it could have been much funnier if it hadn’t relied so much on vulgarity and gore. Not that I am a prude by any means, but the scenes involving said elements simply fall flat. (Except for one near the beginning of the movie involving hands and piano playing.) When the movie shows off its brains and satirical might — ala the opening previews and some of Sandusky’s monologues — it’s hilarious. When it goes lowbrow, it just feels like its grasping at straws.
As I was watching the film, it was difficult to hide my disappointment. I kept wondering how, with such a fantastic cast and a great premise, the opportunity to make a truly great comedy was squandered.
3.0 out of 5.0 stars
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