Tropic Thunder: A Review

The premise of Tropic Thunder is funny.  Take a bunch of pampered Hollywood stars, put them in a war movie, and then drop them inside a real war zone without their knowledge in order to film the gritty realism.  Add to that the pretentious method actor who is a white man playing a black man to the hilt and you've got a recipe for a hilarious movie.  A bunch of prima donna actors end up lost in the jungle fighting a real war when they think it is just a movie.  That could be funny.  Leave it to the real Hollywood to screw it up. 

I'm not going to say Tropic Thunder is without its laughs.  Matthew McConaughey as Ben Stiller's agent has a singlemindedness about getting his client Tivo on location that brings the laughs.  Robert Downey as Kirk Lazarus, the white man playing a black man, has his moments. But overall this is a film where if you told the screen writers (which includes Ben Stiller and Ethan Cohen) that they couldn't use the f-word or refer to any part of the male anatomy they would have virtually no jokes to tell.  The film is obscenity laced in the worst way, namely living under the delusion that if you have your characters scream "mother f---" enough it mysteriously becomes funny. 

The film inexplicably rejects its premise fairly early on.  Essentially no one except the Ben Stiller character ever really believes they are shooting a movie.  The characters know that things have gone wrong and they are now on their own inside a war zone (to be precise they are attacked by drug lords).  That takes away much of the comedy. It's funny if people think they are making a war movie but in fact it's real.  That allows for a lot of false braggadocio, but in Tropic Thunder you really only get that in one scene. The film could derive jokes from its premise, the pampered nature of the characters, the slick marketing of Hollywood, the ruthlessness of the entertainment world.  But there is precious little of this in Tropic Thunder.  Just oral sex jokes.  It wasn't funny in American Pie and it isn't funny now. 

The movie opens with fake trailers for the actors' other films.  Jack Black plays an actor who stars in a series of lame comedies about the eponymous family "The Fatties." Black's Tropic Thunder character, Jeff Portnoy, plays all the members of a fat family who apparently do nothing but fart.  This is the only joke in the "Fatties" movies.  Sorry to say, but Tropic Thunder's humor is not much more sophisticated than the fart humor the movie makes fun of with "The Fatties."