Tropic Thunder Not Your Typical Vietnam Flick
Black is marginally funnier and Downey has a great time playing the pretentious Australian, but despite the film’s many signals that it is willing to go anywhere for a laugh — a gag involving Coogan is shocking, although not particularly funny — the interplay between the fake black guy and the real one never gets nasty and political. The Aussie winds up being no more offensive than Michael Scott is on The Office.
An R-rated comedy has to go farther than TV.
And this one does, but Downey has little to do with it. Tom Cruise’s part, which was rumored to be an unbilled cameo, turns out to be much more than that. He’s in a bunch of scenes and he owns every one of them. It might ruin the joke for you to learn too much about what he does, so read no farther if you’d rather be surprised by his appearance, which is so startlingly funny it might just reverse the course of the last three years of bad publicity he’s earned himself.
Cruise plays the producer of the movie within the movie, a guy so pudgily enraged, so hairy and yet so bald, that he is going to owe royalties to Scott Rudin for theft of personality. On a conference call from Hollywood to the set of the film, he blasts away with an R-rated tirade and later, when he has to deal with actual murderous criminals, he’s so nasty that they’re the ones who get scared. Cruise’s portions of the film (which also feature a lackluster Matthew McConaughey as the Stiller character’s agent) carry some nicely creepy undertones about the viciousness of showbiz. At the midpoint things seem about to tip from gross-out comedy into Network territory. This is the funniest Cruise has ever been, unless you count the couch jumping (and you probably should).
Satisfying though it may be, satire doesn’t sell enough tickets to pay the bills on a blockbuster. So we keep cutting back to more mugging by Stiller on the way to a final act that delivers not a parody of an action movie but a real action comedy like something out of the late 80s, complete with explosions and flamethrowers and guys emptying the clips of M-16s with both hands while yelling, “Aaaugggh!”
Stiller stages the action scenes pretty well, at least as well as in the most recent Rambo movie, and the transition works better than you’d guess.
But Stiller knows where his moneymaker is, so he brings us back to Cruise in the end. Cruise may have made Lions for Lambs but he doesn’t fail us this time. He does a hip-hop I-love-me dance, with his gold dollar-sign pendant bouncing around his furry chest, that Will Ferrell could not have improved upon.
Tom Cruise, comedian? And you thought only his religion was hilarious.
Tropic Thunder
Directed by Ben Stiller
Starring: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr.
2.5 stars/ 4
106 minutes/Rated R
Gack.
Your tagline is terrible. Maybe you don’t understand what the word “classic” means?
Scott Rudin… and Sumner Redstone.
Tom Cruise was good before he went crazy
This looks completely idiotic. I will have to go see it.
I’m a Downey fan. But I may wait for this to come out on tape.
I have never understood what anyone could see in Ben Stiller.
Tom Cruise is an actor? I thought he was a priest for Scientology.
I’m definitely seeing this…I’ve been waiting forever for a comedy version of Apocalypse Now.
Good thing they didn’t make fun of autism. The pearl clutchers would have shot into space.
I won’t waste ticket price on it, but as soon as it gets to DVD, I’m seeing it! Funny, how everyone who is supposed to be so sensitive about religion feels they must babble about Cruise’s which to my knowledge, has nothing to do with the film? Maybe we should point out the Jews too?
Javelin:
That reply must have been about my post. If Cruise was running around and making videos about the joys of being catholic then that’s what the joke would have been about. Mel Brooks and others have made a career out of “pointing out the Jews” so that’s been done. I didn’t think my stupid joke warranted a reply but I guess you get easily offended.
In case you haven’t heard, this film uses a word equivalent to the n-word – A LOT!
Stiller is stupid if he thinks that “free Speech” covers the filth in this film.
Join the ‘R-word’ Campaign
Special Olympics invites you to join the ‘r-word’ campaign. We are leading an effort to address the harmful impact and negative attitudes associated with the use of the word ‘retard.’ Help make a change by taking the r-word pledge at
http://www.r-word.org
And check this out too:
Soeren Palumbo is a senior honors student at Fremd High School in Wheeling, Illinois, and big brother to Olivia. During Writer’s Week (in March 2007), he gave the following speech to a gymnasium full of his high school peers and faculty and received a standing ovation. View a YouTube video of the speech.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CoqaNG0Ozqc
Just saw this movie. And it is hilarious. The language is part of the “satire” and it is also funny. Stiller was fine, Cruise was great and Downey was awsome. The action sequences were as well played out as any Rambo flick.
So, making fun of a man’s religion is “OK”, but making fun of the mentally challenged and racial tensions is not? I love all of the hypocrisy and nanny-ism surrounding the critics of this film.
People just REALLY aren’t getting the joke with the “Simple Jack” routine. It works on so many levels because it is an indictment of how Hollywood profits by exploiting those with challenges. I have a son with Autism and one with Asperger’s -not the same as retardation, I know, but still – and I laughed hysterically. The fact that the foreign audience idolizes “Simple Jack” is even better: MANY once-popular U.S. bands and entertainment acts are still quite successful overseas long after they’re considered yesterday’s news stateside.
The whole point of satire is to make fun of people/groups who take themselves too seriously. The “trailers” at the front of this movie should clue you in: over-the-top cartoons of oversexed rappers, overhyped action heroes, and gratuitous swipes at Eddie Murphy and Brokeback Mountain.
The end credits said “no animals were harmed in the making of this movie” but I’m pretty sure that quite a few sacred cows were slaughtered.
I saw this movie yesterday and thought it was really funny. It’s worth seeing.
Robert Downey Jr. cracks me up… he’s got a knack for not taking himself too seriously