Tropic Thunder Brings Jungle Fever

You're in the movie house, waiting for Tropic Thunder to begin, but first you have to sit through the commercials and previews of coming attractions. There's a spot for--wait a minute--Booty Sweat, an energy drink from the rapper Alpa Chino. Then a trailer for Scorcher VI, a Rambovian sequel in which the Stallone figure closely resembles a bulked-up Ben Stiller. A teaser for The Fatties: Fart 2 seems awfully Eddie Murphy, with one comic playing multiple members of a morbidly obese family, yet the actor under all that latex could well be Jack Black. Finally, a preview for the art-house drama Satan's Alley, about medieval monks coping with their big gay love for each other, is supposed to star superserioso actor Kirk Lazarus ... but no, it's Robert Downey Jr.

And then the DreamWorks logo appears, and Tropic Thunder storms onto the screen.

A parody of war movies and a pinprick in the helium balloon of Hollywood egos, Tropic Thunder caps a hectic summer of action films and star-driven comedies and is designed as a blend and a semiloving critique of both genres. The picture is savvy to the max, maybe to excess; but Stiller, who also directed and co-wrote the movie, surely figures that in the blogosphere age, no film can be too inside--it's where everyone is. He's been there all his life, as the son of (Jerry) Stiller and (Anne) Meara, a comedy duo of over a half-century's duration. It's in Ben's genes to make fun of show business, as he did earlier in the priceless male-model comedy Zoolander, and to see it in a fun-house reflection: Stiller and mirror.

The conceit this time is that three stars have come to Vietnam to shoot a war film called Tropic Thunder, based on a book by a fabled Vietnam vet (Nick Nolte). Each star is in a career rut: Tugg Speedman (Stiller) needs the sweet nectar of acclaim, Jeff Portnoy (Black) wants to shift from farce to drama, and Method man Lazarus (Downey) so hopes to hear critics' cheers for his role as an African-American sergeant that he has undergone a surgical procedure to darken his skin. With the film a month behind schedule after five days of shooting, the director (Steve Coogan) decides to go for that verismo vibe: they'll finish the film with no crew around, only hidden cameras and surprise explosions. But a couple of things go wrong, and the stars, plus rapper-actor Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) and tyro talent Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), wander into a real war with actual bad guys and live ammunition. Art meets life; schlock faces imminent death.

The early effusion of blood (which geysers out of a hole in a soldier's helmet) and guts (a wound in Speedman's stomach spills a sausage factory's worth of entrails) cues you to the objects of Stiller's burlesque: jungle war movies from Apocalypse Now to Apocalypto, from Platoon to a raft of Rambos. A key inspiration had to be Hearts of Darkness, the documentary on the catastrophic filming of Apocalypse Now.

Laughing with the Brain

Make-Believe war is hell, stiller suggests, but Hollywood is hell on the Pacific, and the enemy is just as dangerous as the drug lords Speedman's squad runs into. The actor's agent, Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey, who nearly ambles away with the picture), worries mainly that his client hasn't been perked with TiVo. But Peck is a baby seal next to studio boss Les Grossman (deliciously played by Tom Cruise as a bald, grotesquely hairy Moloch), whose obscene phone calls usually include the threat to put something big of his into something small of the other fellow's. When Peck learns that Speedman has been captured by the bandits, he gets a little shiver of conscience: "They'll kill him." Grossman nods reverently, "And we will weep. In the press."

The notion of performers being mistaken for cutthroat adventurers has served movie comedies from the 1940s (Gene Kelly's The Pirate and a bunch of Hope-Crosby Road pictures) to the '80s (¡Three Amigos!). It speaks to the bluster and resilience of show people; when in mortal peril, they do improv and survive. The difference in Tropic Thunder is that the main characters are more eccentric than likable. That's just what you'd expect in a Stiller movie.

Whereas most male stars in the Saturday Night Live era (a line that stretches from Bill Murray to Seth Rogen) sport a louche, slackerish affability, Stiller often plays the less-than-pleasant comic foil: the tightly wound unhero who either gets on everyone's nerves (Dodgeball, The Royal Tenenbaums) or is the hapless pawn of domestic fate (Meet the Fockers, The Heartbreak Kid). As actor, writer or director, he knows something most Hollywood people don't: certain characters needn't be lap-dog lovable--if they're funny enough, the movies they're in can still be hits.

Problem is, the Tropic Thunder stars seem rich at first, but they don't grow; they grow repetitious. Lazarus is a mix of Russell Crowe, Daniel Day-Lewis and Robert De Niro in his body-punishing Raging Bull days, and Downey brings a nice pomposity to his blackface posturing and righteous-pimp drawl. (The joke, by the way, is clearly not on African Americans; it's on the actor's belief that he can play anyone.) But Lazarus and the others out there in the jungle don't evolve or devolve; they are figures from an SNL skit or the director's own very smart Ben Stiller Show back in 1992.

McConaughey and Cruise, and Bill Hader as Cruise's quick-leaping toady, fare much better--in part because the spectacle of the powerful luxuriating in their venality is always ripe for satire, in part because they're onscreen only intermittently. The real action is in Vietnam, where stuff blowing up and stars in pain are meant to provide most of the entertainment.

It's possible that to an old pro like Stiller, making an audience laugh is easy, too easy. The bigger challenge is not to underline the humor but to undermine it--to illustrate, within the form of a movie spoof, a thesis on the mechanics of comedy creation. Those opening trailers are hilarious and devastatingly acute, but the rest of Stiller's film could be more a deconstruction of comedy than a display of it. The brain gets the joke; the ribs are untickled.

So here's what Les Grossman might see as a money quote: "Tropic Thunder is the theoretically funniest movie movie of the year." Make that "... of the year!!!"