very funny -- Stiller's best work on film

Rating: 8/10 (27 October 2008)

Ben Stiller has always been more interesting as a writer and director than simply as a comedy personality. "The Ben Stiller Show" was one of the sketch comedy gems of the 1980s although it got canceled right after I discovered it, and although also not hugely successful he showed with "Zoolander" that he could be irreverent and very funny on the big screen as well. I thought "Tropic Thunder" was even more irreverent, almost anarchic, and more entertaining than "Zoolander." The kind of "laugh out loud" moments that seem to elude him to some extent in "Zoolander" are peppered much more evenly throughout this film. And just as "Zoolander" was basically about the shallow aspects of celebrity culture in America, so too this film has fun with the pretensions of actors and their relative self-seriousness. For example the character of the agent (played by Matthew McConaughey, but written for Owen Wilson) is so absurdly dedicated to his job of getting his client a TIVO device that one would think that his life depended on it - then to throw us for a loop the scene towards the end is contrived where Stiller's character is actually saved by the TIVO.
The film is full of great cameo performances, such as Tom Cruise channeling Joe Pantoliano (I thought it actually was Pantoliano until the final moments of the film) playing an agent character somewhat similar to Jerry Stiller's character in "Zoolander." But it's really got a good heart in the primary group of characters played by Stiller, Robert Downey Jr, Jack Black, and Brandon Jackson. The fake trailers at the beginning of the movie were perfect -- they got the audience roaring with laughter and also introduced the basic differences between the 4 actors, or is that the character of the actors? Some of the lines are blurred here, as Downey's character in particular strikes us as a parody of his own actual career (in one hilarious scene we see him on a balcony with a bottle of tequila giving fans the middle finger). It definitely would not be the same movie with Downey Jr. and Stiller being so perfect for their roles and essentially spoofing their own careers.
McConaughey is the biggest surprise of the movie... I just have never found him amusing at all before in any of the chick flick comedies he makes. He was excellent here and really cut loose.
Just like with Zoolander's glamorization of bi-sexuality and tendency to mock even seemingly innocuous aspects of our culture, this is a film that will probably offend everyone. And that's fantastic. I can't stand how 99% of Hollywood comedies these days are basically "safely offensive." You can make any number of fart jokes and turd jokes, and people are happy to be offended by that. But this film is even more extreme than "Zoolander" as far as shaking up conservative culture -- the film mocks the acclaim that goes to actors who play "retards", for example, and the obscenely patronizing way that African Americans are often portrayed in film. Certain aspects of our culture just beg to be lampooned, but Stiller has a way of finding things like this that are hilarious but which make people far more uncomfortable. Most writers would not give themselves a character who murders a Panda Bear. It's not a conservative measure of "irreverance", it's more like Stiller's taking things into Monty Python territory. No one and nothing is safe.
My only slight or faint reservation about the movie is that for a film that mocks "stunt casting" so much, it sure indulges in quite a bit of it especially with Tom Cruise in all that makeup. And I even hear faint "Oscar Buzz" for Downey Jr. I don't think the Academy would touch this movie with a 100 foot pole, but it plays into the fact that the movie actually provides some interesting character acting in the context of a movie that seems to mock such pretensions. I'm still unsure if that's a brilliant aspect of the film or merely a casually inconsistent one.