film: Tropic Thunder

I’d give my left arm to be Ben Stiller. Well, perhaps not the whole arm. That would be excessive. Just a little bit of the elbow. Or some of the skin. The man’s had an exceptional career. A rolecall of high quality fare. Zoolander. Dodgeball. The brilliant There’s Something About Mary. Recently, he recruited the biggest names in world entertainment to play soldiers with him in Tropic Thunder.

On paper, this movie sounds funny. Take a bunch of movie stars, drop them into a real-life jungle and watch what happens when they encounter real-life terrorists. And visually, the idea of Jack Black in combats and people blowing up should be, well, pantwettingly amusing, if you’ll excuse the pun. But well no…it’s not.

So the bad news is it’s not quite as funny in reality as it is on paper. The good news is that it’s got an awful lot going for it. The movie looks unfeasibly expensive, boasts some marvellous set pieces and unites some of the funniest men in Hollywood.

Stiller, Black, Coogan, Downey Jr., Hader, Nolte and Cruise. Yes, my friends, Cruise. And when I say Cruise. I really do mean Cruise. Tom Cruise. Thomas Cruise May-pother The 4th. Yes, indeedy– the Cruiser is nothing short of a revelation. His turn as Les Grossman, a greedy studio boss with attitude, is arguably the performance of his career.

Equally fine, it must be said, and perhaps even finer is Robert Downey Junior’s turn as Australian actor Kirk Lazarus, a man so hungry for Oscars that he not only turns himself black but believes he is black. Blessed with most of the film’s laughs, Downey positively brings home the bacon and in a delicious twist of fate is justifiably rewarded with an Oscar nomination of his own in real life. As a result of his performance, and that of Messr Cruise, Tropic Thunder just squeezes in as a 4 star film. Goodbye.

For the best of the rest:

Rollingstone:
Think of all the ways you can hurt yourself laughing, as in fall down, split your sides, bust a gut, blow your mind. You get it all in Tropic Thunder, a knockout of a comedy that keeps you laughing constantly. It’s also killer smart, lacing combustible action with explosive gags. Major props to Ben Stiller, the director, co-producer, co-writer and co-star, who shows us Hollywood at war with its own ginormous ego during the making of a megabudget Vietnam War movie with an uproariously inept cast and crew.

The Telegraph:
It’s a send-up of inflated, corpulent, grandiose Hollywood: its more-is-better philosophy; the super-sized egos of its actors and directors and executives; the imperialism of its production shoots.

Channel 4:
Hollywood stars filming a Vietnam biopic get caught up in the drug wars in Ben Stiller’s gory comedy. Robert Downey Jr plays the method actor so committed to his role that he is surgically altered to appear black