Tropic Thunder

This was good giddy fun. Kicking off nicely even before it starts with four faux movie trailers that introduce each character, the latest Ben Stiller film is as good a movie about movies I’ve seen in a while (in fact, the faux movie trailers seemed uncannily at home with trailers for College and Righteous Kill). In brief, here’s the story and my take:

Three wildly successful Hollywood stars, Tugg Speedman (Stiller), Kirk Lazarus (Downery, Jr.), Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a hip-hop star by the name Alpa China (Brandon T. Jackson), and an up-and-coming actor Andrew Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), team up to film the ultimate Vietnam War epic, based on the “true” account of a daring rescue mission written by Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), who is played by Speedman. Everything goes to hell during the the film’s most expensive shoot, when Tugg’s and Kirk’s egos clash in front of the backdrop of a $4 million pyrotechnics display and unrolling cameras. When his producer Les Grossman (an unfunny Tom Cruise) threatens to rip off his cock and shove it up his ass or something to that effect, the director (Steve Coogan) hatches a plan with the real Tayback (on the set as a consultant) to plant the five actors in the middle of the jungle, without any cell phones, in order to get them to shed their egos and experience the Vietnam War as it was lived and deliver the goods on hidden cameras. A chopper drops the five actors and their desperate director in the middle of who knows where (turns out to be not too far from an opium farm run by a heavily armed militia) and boom! we have the film’s first really outrageous (and hilarious) gag, and we’re off.

Robert Downey, Jr. is brilliant as Kirk Lazarus, a mutli Oscar-winning Australian actor whose method of acting makes method acting look like something out of a round of charades. He’s undergone a pigment-altering procedure so as to get into his character, the black army sergeant Lincoln Osiris. I would strongly recommend that you keep your eyes on Downey, Jr., as his mannerisms, gestures, and utterances, so carefully chosen and precisely delivered, often go by too quickly (I can’t remember all of them, but one line sticks in my mind as being delivered with what Jerry Lewis calls “exquisite timing”: “I don’t read the script, the script reads me”).

This film has its oddly vacant moments. Stiller risks a lot on gags that have to be played out long and hard, and several of these gags miss right out of the gate, and you have to sit through them until they run their course (most of these involve Cruise). Others, however, are not only good, they get better as they get drawn out. And some of the throwaways gags, lasting barely a few seconds, get the loudest laughs. Black’s character begins to feel the nauseating and pyschosis-inducing effects of withdrawal, as a candy bag full of coke he is carrying is stolen from him by a bat. One of the film’s funnier moments comes when Black happens upon the bat again. What ensues is only one of several instances of a character descending into his own version of a shared hell: the unbearable thought that there is no “getting into a character,” that there is nothing more to being than the endless production of its own content as itself.

This film about Hollywood is rather polite, all in all. Only once does it decide not to pull its punches: Kirk explains to Tugg why his film Simple Jack was a box-office disaster: he went full retard.

This is certainly nastier stuff than Zoolander, from seven years ago, and much of it is deliciously and fiercely obscene. Jack Black is the most outrageous, but nearly a day after having seen the film I’m left with the lingering images of Robert Downey, Jr.’s Kirk Lazarus’s Osiris. It’s Stiller’s film, obviously, and a rather dull plot develops around his character mid-way. But in this film about the artificial light of dim stars, Downey, Jr. just beams.