Tropic Thunder

[rating:4]
Director: Ben Stiller
Starring: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Brandon T. Jackson

Tropic Thunder is good. It’s worth seeing and, given the action spectacle on top of the comedy, it’s worth seeing on the big screen.

The film is very funny, but cowriter/director/star Ben Stiller forgets sometimes that not everyone in the world is so wired into the important goings-on in Hollywood that all his parodic swipes at the freaky fishbowl he lives in are going to work.

But occasionally I forget that whole swaths of the population subscribe—not just read, but freakin’ subscribe to Us Weekly and People, and watch “E!” What is “E!” anyway? Is it a syndicated show or some entire network wedged somewhere high up the cable channel list? Seriously, I don’t know this. So maybe I shouldn’t be telling Ben Stiller he’s out of touch, y’know?

Robert Downey Jr. is incredible, and he keeps proving it in the weirdest ways. Memo to all the people being offended by the “blackface” issue: Downey is not a white man playing a black man. He is a white man playing a white man pompously and pretentiously playing a black man. Being offended by Downey for mocking the very thing you find offensive—some hotshot honky actor thinking he can play a black man—is knee-jerk, humor-deficient, short-fused controversy-trolling. Get some damned perspective and go fight injustice, or something.

The Short Version Acting Highlight: Robert Downey Jr.’s performance Directing Highlight: The over-the-top (and screamingly loud) action bits Writing Highlight: The opening “trailers” that sketch out our cast and the film’s themes in a fast, funny way. (Also, a rapper/actor named “Alpha Chino.” Genius.)

Downey maintains his African-American persona for most of the film, but we do also see him as the self-important Australian superstar playing the African American, and then it should be the Russell Crowe Fan Club that does the protest letters and boycotts.

As a director, Ben Stiller does a great job not just with action sequences, but action sequences that are intended as over-the-top parodies of the excesses of action films. This requires him to master the techniques and then push them to a level of sustained brutality that is funny. That’s a fine line, and surely some viewers will just be put off, especially in the opening when the comic intent is less blatant, but I’m sayin’ Stiller does a hell of a job.

The story drags in places, and unlike Downey, Stiller is not playing a character anywhere outside his familiar comfort zone, which is another kind of drag. But the core story (the parts you’d remember if you had to tell someone, “And then, after that, this happened”) are solid. The movie is good, and if it were to be judged merely as a wacky Hollywood sendup of war and action films, Hollywood itself, and specifically Apocalypse Now and the legendary nightmare of its production, it would deserve three stars. It’s not, overall, a film that people will return to for years of comic delight. Except for Downey, and to a lesser degree, Tom Cruise’s full-throttle fat-suit portrayal of a stereotypically assholish Hollywood producer. They elevate good material in a movie that just needed the tiniest bit of punching up or editing (panda joke: totally unearned, a disruptive sight gag) to something really memorable.

Tags: ben stiller, comedy, jack black, robert downey jr.