Stupid, but not in a funny way

Rating: 3/10 (7 September 2008)

Every now and then a movie comes out that leaves its audience asking how in God's name did this film ever get made? How did the pitch go to its producers ...? Let me see if I've got this straight: You want to make a comedy about some pampered actors making a Vietnam movie who are purposely thrown into an actual confrontation to lend some realism to the operation? Then you see who produced the film -- the actual film -- and then you start to understand: Ben Stiller, the star of the movie -- actual and fictional.
Ugh.
When I was a kid my friends and I would get together in my back yard and shoot comical karate movies with the video camera from the AV department of the school where my Dad taught high school biology. We'd ham it up and watch them over and over again, laughing hysterically each time. But even when I was 13, I knew that the reason these movies were so funny to us was because we were the stars and because we got all the inside humor. One wonders if Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr. and the assorted other Hollywood A-listers filling the supporting rolls in this film ever knew as much as I did when I was 13. As I looked around at my fellow moviegoers as the credits rolled on 'Tropic Thunder,' watching Tom Cruise on the screen dancing to some rap song and made up to look like a fat, balding typical Hollywood movie producer, I can tell you with the utmost earnestness, they do not. We all sat there in the dark, waiting for the rest of the laughs a movie with such talent available must surely provide, ultimately. But alas, it never did. Maybe 'Tropic Thunder' is funny to people who work in the movie industry, but I wouldn't know because I'm not one of them -- and neither is 99% of the movie-going audience.
Sure there are a few giggles and guffaws here and there, but 'Tropic Thunder,' can never quite make up its mind about what it is. Is it satire or slapstick? It tries for both but achieves neither. Mostly it's just a lot of crude humor and hammed-up bluster.
I'm no expert, but it seems to me satire works best when you can really focus on the material you're sending up and not distract by randomly introducing strange, unique elements to your story. For instance, in what universe would the head of a jungle-dwelling, gun-toting Asian heroin ring be a 10 year old boy? What are you lampooning? Heroin rings? And its weird enough that a movie director would allow his actors to be set up for real danger on the orders of the movie's producer, so you really don't need the author of the book the film's based on to be a fraud, too. We understand some actors go a little nuts and don't break character, but you needn't conjure up some fictional surgical procedure that allows white people to become black to drive that comic point. You keep all the other constants constant, see, so you can focus on the core humor.
And having no core humor is not an excuse -- though that would surely be the one this film's makers would offer if pressed by an angry mob of moviegoers each seeking a refund. If you've seen the TV trailers for this picture, you've already seen much of the few decent one-liners. And watching Stiller once again set himself up to be hilariously humiliated over and over grew tiresome somewhere around the middle of 'Meet the Parents.' Jack Black's comic talents are squandered. Robert Downey Junior never quite delivers as a Russell Crowe type perpetually lost in a Shaft-esquire black militant role he's playing for the movie being made in the story. Uh, yeeaahh ... that's sooooo Russell Crowe. Matthew McConaughey phones in some whacked out Hollywood agent. Nick Nolte forgettably mumbles up the book author role. And Tom Cruise's performance, as the movie producer, is notable mainly for its clumsiness and bad taste.
Things blow up, people blow up, bats are eaten, disgusting, distasteful things happen. There's a lot of tortured movie-about-movies humor that never really gets any traction. But the problem is you never really care about why any of it's happening and that's often the difference between good comedy and bad. It stands to reason clowny things will happen to a bunch of clowns and that's all this movie's characters are ever shown as. Who cares? Staying in and checking the latest stand-up act on Comedy Central's a better bet than dropping your 9 at the theatre on this one.
This movie review by Erik Gloor.