Not Funny - A Fair Appraisal

Rating: Null/10 (18 October 2008)

Behind Hollywood's cameras are legions of underpaid helpers doting on pampered mega-celebrities. Egos and budgets have become so inflated that much of the screen time once devoted to the dynamic relationship between an actor and his role have been replaced by product ads, staid repetition and computer generated doo-dah's. As such, much of the grittiness of early cinema is being gradually reduced to a strict regimen of movie-making by numbers. And, by now, what the average member of the public is often exposed to upon an innocent trip to the cinema is the mass-market mass-murder of an entire art form  at a cost of £8 a go! To determine who is responsible for this you need look no further than the mega-celebrities themselves. This is partly why I found Tropic Thunder so detestable. I enjoyed this expose on the vanity & shallowness of Hollywood by those who are perpetrating it as much as I would a lecture on cultural diversity as conducted by a member of the Third Reich.
Those who haven't yet seen the film and merely want a light, comical romp written by and starring a few funny guys will also be disappointed. I'm afraid the film fails to deliver even on this front. The scenes involving Tom Cruise go beyond being simply unfunny or cringe-worthy to the point whereby funnier men, perhaps those long since dead, would be sickened by or turning in their graves as a result of them. I would suggest that even the stars of the movie should, by all rights, have made themselves feel a little queasy.
It's not that there are no funny jokes in the film  it's just that all 3 of them get lost in a jumble of film making where the ability to suspend belief just isn't enough. Ben Stiller is OK in the movie, as is Jack Black. They are too eminently likable to deride and seem more like they belong in this movie than the others. Although this is coming from a man who never saw 'Envy,' which may be so awful as to nullify my generosity towards them.
Furthermore, the character played by Robert Downey Jr is catastrophic - despite Downey's valiant effort at making the rotten role work. For those who don't know, he is essentially a modern day minstrel (white guy 'blacked-up') who has grown proud of his elective-surgery-altered skin colour - rather unconvincingly so to those who are of that skin colour by birth. This is a mechanism often used in films for some cheap comedy, and a technique that worked rather well - for a time. It was hilarious in Airplane when the old lady talked jive, for example. But the art of it 'being funny when a white person spoke like a black person' died a horrible death, or at least was beaten to a bloody pulp, when Steve Martin starred in the reprehensible 'Bringing Down the House.' And if there was any doubt as to the damage done by Martin, then watching Tom Cruise also decide to dance like a black person is where that debate draws to an emphatic close. It just isn't funny.
Nor, for that matter, is Steve Coogan, who should know far better. Nor is Matthew McWhoever  who's odd, surplus character is a vacuous Hollywood agent who goes to a war-zone over a Tivo dispute (and somehow escapes on foot where the leads of the film barely made it with a head-start and a helicopter.) Nor is the explosives expert who comes across as a caricature of a caricature of a Kevin Smith/Napoleon Dynamite style 'dude' character who's role would be cut-down to one line during the editing process. Nor is the guy playing the rapper who isn't a natural comedian and seemingly shouldn't be an actor. Nor is the joke about Booty Juice - and even less so it's continual usage. Not even comical is the laughable choice of casting a child as the main 'bad guy.' Just after his miniature silhouette arrived on screen I was plunging two fingers down my throat in a vain attempt to purge the newly-acquired badness from the pit of my soul.
But on a lighter note, there are two things about this movie I do like. 1/ The bit where Jack Black says, "Ouch, my ass!" 2/ The fact that next to running time it didn't say 'Eternity.' In conclusion, if a friend asks you to go see Tropic Thunder with him, just look at him, dead in the eyes for as long as it takes - ignoring his appeals that you look away or respond - until he becomes so uncomfortable with the morbid atmosphere that he will be left with no choice but to eventually mutter under his breath, in a defeated whisper, "guess not then"