"Tropic Thunder" is satire of powerful and shallow Westerners--not racially stereotypical

Rating: 7/10 (12 September 2008)

Having just seen "Tropic Thunder," I'm surprised at the notion that it was crafted with a bias against African-Americans or Asians. In fact, it's aimed at the pretensions of a certain class of powerful and shallow people in American cinema. They've been lampooned before--the schmoozing agent, the crude type-A studio exec, the intellectual dilettante actor. This movie effectively sets 'em up and plows 'em down.
In "Tropic Thunder," all of these characters are white, and are portrayed by white people. Robert Downey, Jr.'s Australian actor, a five-time Oscar winner who specializes in "arty" films, is the white-masquerading-as-black. The script makes him look like a fool at the hands of the film's one major genuine African-American character (one of the two level-headed major characters in the film), while hosing the sorts of bad token roles that African-American actors tend to get in films like this. In the end, as part of the serio-comic growth in the film's characters, Downey's actor discards his lame disguise and embraces his, uh, Australian-ness.
As to the Burmese in this movie, they're mainly foils. They're depicted as competent warriors (as opposed to the Hollywood poseurs). The one ridiculous aspect is their respect for Ben Stiller's character's lousy work as a mentally disabled man in a previous flop film--which is par for the course in a ribald spoof like this. The few Vietnamese in the film are hotel workers who are saddled with Hollywood prima donnas and drunken Western package tourists.