Cast: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black

Director: Ben Stiller

Screenplay: Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux

Running time: 1 hr 47 mins

Genre: Comedy/War



CRITIQUE:

Film parodies were once hot topics. From pop culture to famous flicks, from celebrity moments to embarrassing stunts, referencing seemed to have been a business goldmine. Airplane, Hot Shots, and Scary Movie were a few paradigms. That’s until it loses steam. Sequels upon sequels came rolling, and the parody wasn’t funny anymore. Everything now seems to spin around fart, sex, genitalia, drugs and racist jokes. Meanwhile, when Tropic Thunder’s trailer arrived, it came with a promise: to reinvent the parody genre. Now the finished product is three sardonically funny-ish fake trailers, a good first ten-minute in, and a whole movie of wasted sweat, mock blood and set explosives. The concept is ambitious, a pisstake on the Vietnam War genre, forking out homage to Platoon and Apocalypse Now, while retaining its own plot about filmmaking of a movie within a movie – but perhaps it became too ambitious that the makers bang more bucks on the “look” and “appeal” and forgot about the script. Whilst this is sold-out as a comedy, it comes out as a farce on an actioner that couldn’t quite deliver the hilarity it intends. Guts spilling out. Not funny. Jack Black after a snort on crack. Not funny. A Vietnamese toddler as the main villain. Not funny, at all. It tries very hard to make its audience chuckle. It even milked the sketch of Stiller’s “Simple Jack”, which was squeezed the juice out too much. The laughs come from the terrain of the contrived, and like its over-scaled ‘Nam war backdrop, it’s bloated and sopping, putting more explosions rather than explosive laughs. Although gorgeously shot and expensively made, Mister Stiller the Director should realise genuine comedy doesn’t have to cost millions and a swarm of Vietnamese people.


If there’s anything that works in here, it’s the performance panache of Robert Downey Jr., who pushes the envelope further and embodies the Method, multi-Oscar-nabbing actor, donning the black dude. Even Tom Cruise gets a career revival as the exclamation-ridden, spit-bursting studio exec Len Grossman (which makes you forget he’d been jumping on Oprah’s settee some years ago), hardly recognisable beneath the shiny head and hairy arms. The rest borders on mediocrity. Ben Stiller the Actor remains the same hapless, moronic bloke he’s known to play before in his films; Jack Black is an appallingly useless sidekick; and Nick Nolte looks like he wanted to be somewhere else instead. When the dust settles, the film provides us the message that wars are ridiculous, filmmaking can be shambolic, actors are obsessive-compulsive, Hollywood is vicious, and studio bosses are fat, abhorrent and dances to rap music rather disturbingly.


VERDICT:

If not for Downey Jr., this is shambles. The appeal is present but it still generally feels as an extended episode of an MTV skit. It’s over-sold, over-hyped, and over-written, and ends in exhaustion rather than invigoration.



RATING: C