A Summer Breeze

Rating: Null/10 (13 August 2008)

Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.): "I know who I am! I'm the dude playing the dude disguised as another dude!"
Finally this summer, a chance to belly laugh at the super-hero syndrome. Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder satirizes just about every self-absorbed actor who has ever played a hero, including Robert Downey, Jr., this summer's Iron Man, playing a five Oscar winner dying his face to look like a black man and acting all the clichés. His comment above synthesizes this film's irreverent attitude toward an entire industry of phonies and narcissists.
While making the war picture to end all war pictures, a movie production is lost in the jungle, only to find themselves in real combat with narco-terrorists. The crew includes some over-the-hill heroes such as Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), a Sylvester Stallone knockoff, Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a parody of his fat/farting self, and Lazarus. At home, Tom Cruise does an impressive take on a balding, bloated financier, who could be a type of Sumner Redstone, Cruise's nemesis in real life. Matthew McConaughey as Rick Peck, Speedman's faithful agent, also plays the laughs and satire just right.
The current flack over the film's treatment of mentally challenged people is not without merit"You never go full retard"but loses thrust when you consider most of the movie makes fun of most everybody. Criticism could be leveled at performances that garble words, such as Downey's when he tries to mimic stereotypical Black dialogue patterns. Too much of the film's dialogue is lost in the frenzy of blasting and blathering.
Last year's Wild Hogs came at the right time in the summer; Stiller's titillating Tropic Thunder is a summer breeze of laughs, base humor, and biting satire of an industry that can make money making fun of itself.