Would Have Been Twice As Funny If Half As Crude

Rating: 5/10 (18 August 2008)

The funniest part of "Tropic Thunder" comes before the movie starts. There is a commercial for a hip-hop, ghetto drink, "Booty Sweat," advertised by the rapper Alpa Chino, shown lasciviously caressing the sweating bottoms of two jiggling black women. There are coming attractions for three movies, one a satire of Eddie Murphy's "Klump" movies, one a satire of action movies, and one a satire of Oscar-bait, self-serious movies. These bits are funny, but hardly new; satire of popular culture, in MAD magazine, Saturday Night Live, even the "Road" movies, is old stuff. No new ground is broken.
"Tropic Thunder" itself is further satire on the movie business. The problem is, unlike the opening "coming attractions" and ad for Booty Sweat, "Tropic Thunder" doesn't so much satire current movie's repetitiousness, staleness, crudity and heavy-handedness, as it becomes heavy-handed, crude, repetitious, derivative, and stale. Writer-director Ben Stiller seems to be going for an no-holds-barred satire along the lines of "Dr. Strangelove." So, Stiller fills his characters' mouths with the "F" word, the "C" word, the "S" word, and repeated threats to emasculate and variously violate each other. But "Dr. Strangelove" was made during an era writers had to rely on their sophistication, rather than their command of vulgarity, to be funny. In "Tropic Thunder," the use of four letter words and physical threats of emasculation in virtually every sentence becomes incredibly wearying and incredibly unfunny very, very fast.
Robert Downey Jr is good as a full-of-himself multiple Oscar winner who "never breaks character until he's done the DVD commentary." Though white and Australian (and maybe inspired by Russell Crowe?), he plays an African American soldier. Downey's performance has been controversial; but not for any substantive reason. There's nothing offensive in Downey's comedic performance. Tom Cruise, as a Hollywood mogul, is another story. As Manohla Dargis pointed out in the New York Times, Cruise depicts an anti-Jewish stereotype, the crude, hairy, money grubber. And . . . Cruise is just not funny in this part. He is uncomfortable to watch.
Some have complained about the film's references to mentally handicapped people. The movie does NOT make fun of retarded people. Rather, it makes fun of the film community's tendency to distribute Academy Awards to actors who portray mentally handicapped people.