Tropic Thunder (2008)
Directed by Ben Stiller
A group of self-absorbed actors set out to make the most expensive war film ever. After ballooning costs force the studio to cancel the movie, the frustrated director refuses to stop shooting, leading his cast into the jungles of Southeast Asia, where they encounter real bad guys.
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46 films that influenced Tropic Thunder
What critics say influenced Tropic Thunder
Tropic Thunder is the name of the film within the film—a cliché-driven Vietnam picture with echoes of everything from Apocalypse Now and Platoon to the Rambo series embedded like arrows in its derivative hide.
Here, borrowing tropes and images from movies such as Platoon and Apocalypse Now, Stiller’s subject is war movies and overblown action films – but also so much more.
The cast's awful experiences call to mind Apocalypse Now, but the film they are making (also called Tropic Thunder) looks more like a combination of Platoonand Rambo II: war is hell, but, if you discharge enough ordnance, it can make you a stronger human being.
And as the tone changes from "Rambo" to an "Apocalypse Now" vibe, it's good to have a grizzled veteran like Nolte around to keep things completely insane.
The film apes "Apocalypse Now," "Close Encounters" and more, slyly ridiculing production excesses and rampant egotism even as it subscribes to them.
Joining Speedman is Australian thespian Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), who has undergone a very controversial pigmentation surgery in order to portray an African American; Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a comedian famous for playing multiple roles a la Eddie Murphy; Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), a rookie actor and the smartest of the bunch; Cody (Danny McBride), a movie demolitions expert and finally, the director Damien (Steve Coogan), an artsy music video director determined to make a gritty masterpiece akin to Apocalypse Now .
Tropic Thunder skewered the trend with its depiction of Simple Jack , but I always find myself returning in these instances to Edward Norton’s performance in the otherwise forgettable The Score.
The scene in which the derisive Alpa Chino nails Lazarus' recitation of black-uplift homilies as nothing more than the lyrics to the "Jeffersons" theme is funny; but the one in which Lazarus quietly explains to Speedman that his "Simple Jack" character failed because he made the mistake of going "full retard" — rather than softening his character with cuteness in the manner of "Forrest Gump" — is so on-the-nose accurate, it takes your breath away.
His biggest hit, it seems, was the Forrest Gump-like story of a saintly rural imbecile, Simple Jack.
In the most famous example, the film has run into flak from disabled advocates for its repeated use of the word "retard," referring to Speedman's previous bid for artistic respectability, a sentimental "Forrest Gump"-style Oscar bid by the name of "Simple Jack."
This brings a lecture from Lazarus who explains to Speedman that the reason he failed to get accolades that actors like Billy Bob Thorton (Sling Blade), Tom Hanks (Forrest Gump) and Dustin Hoffman (Rain Man) received is that he went "full retard."
Films like Forrest Gump or Radio, that use disabilities to opportunistically manipulate, would be more appropriate subjects for offended anger from Shriver & co., and it's a point in Tropic Thunder's favor that Stiller is willing to call out his colleagues on this.
The result combines elements of "There's Something About Mary ...," "The Player" and "Team America: World Police," and yet almost nothing in "Tropic Thunder" is predictable or cliched.
It plays like a melding of Robert Altman's "The Player" (1992) and Wes Craven's "Scream" (1996).
Not since The Player has the American film industry endured such vicious caricature.
As a jab at the movie business, “Tropic Thunder” is flailing and unfocussed, hardly in the league of “The Player,” and if you want an exposé of the combat movie, strewn with compromise and creative sacrifice, watch “Hearts of Darkness” (1991), about the making of “Apocalypse Now.”
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From its brilliant opening sequence—three bogus “pre-title” trailers establishing the characters and careers of action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller, channeling Stallone), comedian Jeff “Fats” Portnoy (Jack Black, mocking multi-character Eddie Murphy fart-fests like The Nutty Professor ) and multi-Oscar-winning Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr., taking down Russell Crowe and Mel Gibson on his way toward Iron Eagle -era Louis Gosset Jr.), Tropic Thunder marks a clear and welcome return to the sketch-comedy priorities of Stiller’s influential television work.
Black plays Jeff Portnoy, a comedy superstar whose films are a thinly-veiled attack on Eddie Murphy's feature-length fart-gags The Nutty Professor and Norbit.
Joining Speedman is Aussie character actor Kirk Lazurus (Robert Downey Jr.), who undergoes a pigment operation to darken his skin for his role, and Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a comedy actor who made a name for himself in The Fatties – think Eddie Murphy and his many roles in The Nutty Professor and throw in some added farts.
…la Eddie Murphy in "The Nutty Professor."
But it’s tired — the jig has been up on the Rain Man/Shine/I Am Sam stunt for years now, and parodied more bitingly on Mr. Show, South Park and elsewhere.
But Speedman went too far, like Sean Penn in the disastrous I am Sam.
The offense is taken at a plot point which has Stiller's Tugg Speedman, an action hero desperate to be taken seriously, playing a character in the mold of Sean Penn's in I Am Sam.
Apparently, doing so diminishes your chances of walking away with a golden statue, à la Sean Penn in “I Am Sam.” Satires, however, are the complete opposite.
After his character's speech about actors who don't get Oscars when they go "full retard," it's going to be really interesting when Robert Downey Jr. runs into "I Am Sam" star Sean Penn at the next Vanity Fair party.
Sean Penn gave the most professionally shameful, cruelly wrongheaded performance ever nominated for a Best Actor Oscar in 2001’s “I Am Sam” — a film that deserved the bullshit-calling buckshot fired its way by “Tropic Thunder.”
(It’s kind of like Sternberg’s Shanghai Express (1932) with flying viscera, gross-out humor and rampaging bad taste.)
(Film scholar and critic Dave Kehr has pointed out that Downey's black GI seems to be modeled on the one played by blaxploitation icon Fred Williamson in "The Inglorious Bastards," the 1978 Italian movie that's currently on the verge of being remade by Quentin Tarantino.)
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He is a doughy, balding monster with big spectacles and even wider hand gestures, all his power distilled into profanity: a grotesque update, if you will, on the movie executive with the shock of white-hot hair, brought to life by Rod Steiger, in “The Big Knife,” more than fifty years ago.
Safe sex, baby -- think of how further Downey's dad went three decades ago with Putney Swope , and without looking back to make sure audiences were still with him.