Movie Report: Tropic Thunder (2008)

After picking up a number of DVDs at an estate sale recently, I popped this film in first because it’s been in the news recently (last November I posted because some media outlets call retard/retarded “the R-word”).

You know, I think my beautiful wife and I saw this film in the theater, but that would have had to have been on a date night since we had two very young children when this film came out, so maybe we saw it on cable? More likely the theater. There was a time when we would go to a new Ben Stiller film as a matter of course, but this might have been the turning point in that. Not only because we stopped going to movies as frequently once we had kids, but also because Stiller and his crew lost a little something. Or we aged out.

This film is about a group of five actors making a Vietnam War movie: Stiller plays an action movie star who is losing his box-office appeal; Robert Downey, Jr., plays an Australian method actor who undergoes John Howard Griffith treatment so he can play a black man; Jack Black plays an drug addict known for low-brow comedies; some geeky-looking guy plays the actor playing the geeky-looking guy; and some guy plays a rap/hip hop artist trying to break into movies whilst promoting his energy drink and snacks. The shoot, on location, is in trouble, so the author of the book upon which the film is based suggests some cinéma vérité by dropping the actors in the jungle with a vague plan of the goals in the script and to really get into character. After a speech about the goals, the director steps on a landmine and is vaporized. So the actors try to get to point A and then rendezvous with the chopper on their own. Unbeknownst to them, they’re in the area of a drug processing camp with real bad guys afoot.

So the main gags are Ben Stiller is earnest but not too bright; Downey is too enmeshed in his role, leading to conflict with the hip-hop artist; Jack Black is Jack Black; the efforts of Stiller’s shallow agent to get him a Tivo on location as specified in his contract; and Tom Cruise not looking like Tom Cruise as the profane studio head.

So too much of the humor is a bit of inside baseball in the movie making business to really make the film funny. It’s amusing in spots, but not Stiller and his group in their primes. Still, er, I have the film on DVD now and can watch it again in 20 years if the mood again strikes me (and the DVDs don’t decay–so far, so good).