A silly Ben Stiller movie with lots of vulgarity, but funny if you are in the right mood.

Rating: Null/10 (18 February 2009)

Let me admit up-front that I am tired of movies which feature non-stop vulgarity and dirty sexual references, and this movie has all that. In my opinion that keeps it from being a superb movie. But if you can ignore that, there are some very entertaining parts.
Ben Stiller is the writer, director, and star, but the best performances are by two other actors.
Robert Downey Jr. is award-winning Australian actor Kirk Lazarus. For his role in this movie, Tropic Thunder, which relives the daring rescue of soldiers in the 1960s Viet Nam, he underwent a controversial skin coloration procedure which made him look like a black man. So within this movie Downey plays several roles in fake trailers which introduce the character at the beginning of the movie, then he plays a black soldier, and then he plays a blue-eyed, blond Australian. He does all of it well, showing why he is one of the best actors today.
In a definite supporting role Tom Cruise is bald, slightly portly, and irreverent producer Les Grossman. Back in the states, while the movie crew encounter cost overruns in Viet Nam (actually filmed in Hawaii), Les is on the video phone reading them the riot act. At one point, angry at the director for having the cameras off during a very expensive jet bombing run, he tells one assistant to go over and punch the director in the face. He does! Matthew McConaughey is also good in his supporting role as Rick Peck, one of the agents. When his man, who he also considers his best friend, gets captured by real Viet Cong and imprisoned, he has to weigh the cost of rescuing him against the promise of a new airplane that Grossman made him.
Ben Stiller is Tugg Speedman, who has had some flops recently and needs to get back in the public favor with a hit. He is depending on this movie.
Jack Black is Jeff Portnoy, sort of a white parody of Eddie Murphy who makes the fat family movies and plays all the parts. Portnoy makes fat family movies where everyone passes gas.
Nick Nolte has a good role as Four Leaf Tayback, who wrote the book that Tropic Thunder is based on. Only later the actors and crew find out that Tayback never served in Viet Nam and his whole story was a fabrication.
So the whole movie is about their trying to make the movie after the director is blown up after stepping on an old French land mine. While they think they encounter Viet actors with guns shooting blanks, they actually encounter Viet enemy running a large scale drug business, shooting real bullets, and trying to kill or capture them.