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Wednesday, August 13, 2008
‘Tropic Thunder’ cracks great but uneven gags
Tropic Thunder isn’t quite the downpour of laughs the trailers promise. If anything, it’s frustratingly funny.
How can a movie be frustratingly funny? By offering occasional bursts of humor that are so hilarious, it’s a letdown when the energy flags. The movie can’t keep up with itself, but during the best gags, I laughed as hard as I have all year.
The premise is certainly inspired: a hapless crew of filmmakers is trying to shoot the titular Vietnam war epic, but it’s not going well. The director (Steve Coogan) cannot control his cast of egomaniacal actors, including the drug-addicted Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black); the over-prepared Kirk Lazarus, who underwent an operation to play a black man (Robert Downey Jr); and especially, the too-cocky Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller).
So the studio decides to up the stakes: they’ll shoot the movie guerrilla style, with hand-held cameras. Unfortunately, the filmmakers stumble upon a band of actual heroin manufacturers, believing them to be actors. In turn, the dope dealers think the actors are from the Drug Enforcement Agency. The horror. The horror…
Some routines in Tropic Thunder are brilliantly funny, particularly ones that skewer the movie business. One of this movie’s favorite targets is awards-bait pomposity. My loudest laugh in the early going came during one of the fake trailers that proudly presented “Five-time Academy Award Winner Kirk Lazarus, and MTV Movie Award Best Kiss Winner Tobey Maguire!”
Stiller, who co-wrote and directed, does some impressive work visually, aided in no small part by cinematographer John Toll, whose credits include Braveheart and The Thin Red Line. If nothing else, Tropic Thunder just might be the best-looking movie spoof ever made.
If only the movie kept hitting those same highs. Funnily enough, one of Tropic Thunder’s problems is that it’s too self-consciously clever. Stiller has a tendency to set up a great joke, and then wear out its welcome. Case in point: the controversial “Simple Jack” gags that show Tugg hamming it up as mentally disabled man. The problem isn’t that the material is offensive, it’s that Stiller lets it go on too long until the gags become more bizarre than funny. I’m not sure why a preteen drug lord is supposed to be amusing, but there’s one in this movie.
Luckily, the movie has an ace cast to fall back on, Downey turns in one of his wildest performances, playing not so much a caricature as a multi-layered portrait of a man who takes himself way too seriously, on camera and off. Black is ideally cast as the strung out junkie who also borrows a page from the I-play-every-character handbook, a la Eddie Murphy in Norbit.
And then there’s the performance by … well, you’ve probably heard who plays the hyper studio chief by now, but just to be on the safe side, I’ll only reveal it’s an actor whose fallen out of public favor in recent years. He’s hysterically funny, and maybe even the best part of the movie. If this doesn’t get him back in the public’s good graces, nothing will.
Tropic Thunder isn’t so much a great movie as it is a good movie with great scenes - but that’s plenty good enough.
GRADE: B+
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