Ben Stiller (2008)

An action comedy about a group of Hollywood actors shooting a Vietnam War film, deep in an Asian jungle.  They include:  Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), action hero star of the ‘Scorcher’ franchise, who’s recently made a highly unsuccessful attempt to arrest his career decline with a change of direction – as the title character in ‘Simple Jack’, the heartwarming story of a retarded farmhand; Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), obese comedian, drug addict and star of the hit ‘Fatties’ series; Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr), a multi-Oscar-winning Australian method actor, renowned for getting into his roles so deeply that he refuses to come out of them while a movie’s being shot; and a rap star called Alpa Chino (Brandon T Jackson).  The opening credits of Tropic Thunder include a commercial for the energy drink that Alpa Chino advertises (‘Booty Sweat’) and spoof trailers for ‘Scorcher VI – Global Meltdown’, ‘Fatties Fart 2’ and ‘Satan’s Alley’, featuring Kirk Lazarus in a gay love story about two medieval monks.   The other monk is played, in a cameo, by Tobey Maguire and the trailer nods to Robert Downey Jr’s and Maguire’s characters in Wonder Boys, as well as to Brokeback Mountain.  Lazarus is part-Russell Crowe, part-Daniel Day Lewis; Tugg Speedman has a Sylvester Stallone-ish filmography but he’s also a synthesis of other roles that Ben Stiller himself has played (or maybe it’s just Stiller’s strong and familiar screen personality that gives this impression).

The frame of reference is amusing and the parody ads are spot on.  Stiller, who developed the screenplay with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, gets exactly the right balance between accurate imitation of the real thing and exaggeration enough to make you laugh.  The movie jokes and the pastiche elements are a source of recurring enjoyment in Tropic Thunder:  it’s a good-natured lampoon of the pretensions both of actors and of the pantheon of Vietnam War pictures – Apocalypse Now, The Deer Hunter, Platoon, Full Metal Jacket.  John Toll’s cinematography and Theodore Shapiro’s score – because they might be the real thing – give substance to the parody.   Kirk Lazarus is a great idea – he’s had ‘pigmentation alteration surgery’ in order to take on the role of the black Captain Lincoln Osiris (all the names are good) – and Robert Downey Jr plays him expertly.  (Downey isn’t always good at connecting with other actors and maybe that quality helps make him all the funnier here.)  I especially liked a bit when Lazarus explains to Speedman why his Simple Jack failed commercially where simpletons-on-the-surface – like Peter Sellers’ gardener in Being There, Dustin Hoffman’s Raymond in Rain Man and Tom Hanks’s Forrest Gump – succeeded.  Some of the film industry satire in Tropic Thunder is pretty broad (Kirk Lazarus’s five Oscars, for a start) but this analysis of when and why Hollywood loves a retarded protagonist is trenchant.

Except for Steve Coogan as the inept novice British director of the film-within-the-film (it’s a relief when he gets blown up by an old landmine), all the cast are worth watching.  Jay Baruchel is a young, relatively sane supporting actor stuck in the jungle with the four bigger names and egos.  Nick Nolte parodies himself as John ‘Four Leaf’ Tayback, the grizzled Vietnam vet whose memoir is the source of the movie being made (it and he turn out to be entirely bogus).  Back in Hollywood,   Matthew McConaughey is Tugg Speedman’s agent and Tom Cruise, in a fatsuit and skullcap, the tyrant studio executive producing ‘Tropic Thunder’.   (Cruise is OK but not as funny as he should be in this role:  even in heavy disguise he doesn’t seem to let himself go.)  Lots of other famous people turn up fleetingly, usually as themselves.   The fake-ads prologue works so well that it immediately got me wondering how Stiller would sustain the comedy once he moved beyond this skit into the narrative.  The answer, for a little while, is to delay doing that:  for example, he cuts away from the film shoot to an entertainment news programme featuring a piece on the problems on the set of ‘Tropic Thunder’ – and this works well.   Although I didn’t stop admiring the talent at work in the movie, I stopped getting continuous pleasure out of Tropic Thunder once the main story was properly underway.   Ben Stiller has been quoted as saying that:

‘I feel the tone of the movie is its own thing. I think there are elements of satire, but I don’t think it should be categorized just as that. There are elements of parody in it, but obviously I don’t think it’s just that. I feel like hopefully it’s its own thing, which has a lot of familiar stuff that we are playing off of.’

That’s a fair enough description of the film he made here but I think that, in order fully to appreciate Tropic Thunder, you need to be capable of enjoying stupidly violent, relentlessly eventful action movies.  I’m not being snotty when I say I find them unfailingly boring:  I just do.

5 December 2013