Tropic Thunder features four things that tend to turn me off of comedies: it's expensive, high concept, heavily reliant on inside Hollywood humour, and it heavily features Ben Stiller. Any of those four elements could be enough to turn me against a comedy, but all four? There probably wasn't much chance that I'd be into this one.

So why see it? Robert Downey Jr's turn as an acclaimed Australian actor who undergoes cosmetic surgery to turn him into a black man to star in the film-within-the-film intrigued me (as Downey Jr has been on fire of late), and I hoped the presence of assorted Judd Apatow players like Jay Baruchel, Danny McBride, and Bill Hader might help overcome any Stiller-induced shortcomings (I'm about 50/50 on Jack Black in terms of enjoying his films, so his presence is a wash). But mostly, I went because a friend had a free pass and my wife was working that night, so it seemed like something to do to kill an evening.

I suppose by that very limited expectation for entertainment, Tropic Thunder wasn't a complete failure. But for the most part, my misgivings going into the film were confirmed by the film itself. The expensive thing isn't a snobbish response to blockbuster movies, but rather is because with comedies, laughter can't be bought. Other than talent expenses, humour is a cheap commodity, so what tends to happen with big budget comedies is that the focus that should go into finding the humour goes elsewhere (in the case of this film, it's a lot of explosions and location costs, along with the three stars, I'm guessing) and the total cost of the film seems to have an inverse relationship on the amount of laughs to be had (a great example of this would be last year's flop, Evan Almighty). At an estimated $70 million budget, Tropic Thunder isn't egregiously expensive, but you can definitely see the money on screen where I'd prefer to see humour (by comparison, Pineapple Express, another action-comedy, had an estimated budget of $25 million).

As for high concept, I find comedies that rely on high concepts often lose the jokes in the attempt to tell thin stories they can't sustain through entire movies. Tropic Thunder definitely fits that description. The movie follows a big Hollywood production on location as it attempts to film a prestige adaptation of a Vietnam war book. The production is way over budget due to the difficulties brought on by prima donna stars like Stiller's action hero Tugg Speedman, Downey Jr's method acting Kirk Lazarus, and Black's drug-addicted comedian Jeff Portnoy. When director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) tries to bring the production back under budget by stranding his actors out in the jungle in an attempt to film the action guerrilla-style, hilarity ensues when they run into real guerrilla fighters, who confuse the actors with soldiers while the actors confuse them as part of the movie.

Which brings me to my biggest problem with the movie — the movie-within-the-movie thing that rarely works. Hollywood loves making movies about itself, even though it has rarely been proved that many people outside of Hollywood give a damn. It doesn't help that the satire rarely rises above the obvious "movie stars are pampered children" or "actors take themselves too seriously" tropes. There isn't much here that hasn't already been done by Entourage, The TV Set, or any of the other Hollywood satires other than the addition of Ben Stiller's annoying exaggerated energy and Robert Downey Jr in blackface.