Promising Start Then Wrings Itself Dry Even Before Halfway Mark

Rating: 6/10 (20 October 2008)

I will begin by saying that fortunately there are no token female characters. Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen (I swear they hired him for his name) are mature enough not to contrive any demeaning roles for actresses when they aren't necessary in a movie about the making of a Vietnam war film.
All but stealing the show, Robert Downey Jr. is not merely funny but also very good and sometimes even subtle as Kirk Lazarus, an Australian actor who has won five Oscars and has surgically dyed his skin to transform himself into a black man. So committed is he to this role that he remains in character at all times, seemingly convinced that he is actually black.
This exasperates his fellow actor Alpa Chino (ha), a rapper who was born black and blasts Lazarus for his method acting delusions. I'm going to take the opportunity to say that Alpa Chino, like many rappers viewed by many blacks as demeaning, promotes his own chauvinist merchandise, notably Booty Sweat, an energy drink that keeps him going in the jungle. It's also intimated at one point that Chino is gay, meaning that he is posing as something he is not as well. So let us stop the "controversy" over this "troublesome" issue of the film. Anyway, Lazarus is nit-picking of Tugg Speedman (Stiller's character), who starred in a terribly unsuccessful family film called Simple Jack, a movie reminiscent of Jack with Robin Williams or a low-grade Forrest Gump, about a mentally handicapped farmer who thinks animals can understand him.
Unfortunately for this movie, it is Simple Jack that saves their lives when they're taken prisoner. The bored druglords have only one video, an old Simple Jack VHS, and think Speedman is Jack himself. It is here where the movie really starts to overexert itself. The movie opens with promising trailers establishing three of the characters, not only Lazarus and Speedman, but Jeff Portnoy (a typically livewire Jack Black) whose specialty is fart humor. The promise of the trailers is gratified by the hilarious subsequent scene: During the shooting of the memoir of Nick Nolte's creepy Vietnam veteran, the stars, one an action star Tugg, one a five-time Academy Award-winner, one a rap star, one a low-brow drug-addled comedian, and a character actor, behave unreasonably and self-importantly, resulting in a $4 million explosion going off with no cameras shooting. With filming a month behind schedule only five days into shooting, the media dubs it the most expensive war movie never made. The frustrated and scapegoated rookie director played by Steve Coogan is ordered by the artfully profane studio executive played by a shockingly made over Tom Cruise to get the production back on track or risk having it shut down. With inspiration from Nolte, the director drops the indulged and pampered superstars into the middle of the jungle, where he implausibly mounts hidden cameras and special effect explosions manipulated so that he can film guerrilla-style.
If you saw the film up to that point, you would not understand why I'm so disappointed in it, because it really is hilarious up till then. It simply takes a nosedive by further developing its brilliantly narcissistic characters in such hackneyed caricatures and relying upon screaming and explosions for cheap laughs.
The breadth of Ben Stiller's film however is quite amazing. It's a war epic, an echo of Altman's The Player, and an echo of his own Zoolander, and it is the only thing that could end the four-week roll of The Dark Knight. So I will give him that, because in spite of any grave and fatal flaws, it certainly is an intriguing vision. And anyway, it's on Stephen King's list of favorite films of 2008. And so who can argue with Stephen King?