It is in fact Robert Downey Jr.'s Kirk Lazarus – an actor who always fully becomes his characters because he truly is nothing but an empty vessel – who manages to steal the show. Lazarus, a white Australian actor, portrays Lincoln Osiris an African-American, and, in order to add to the authenticity of his portray undergoes surgery to darken his skin. Lazarus is both over-the-top funny and the only real heart the film itself has.
The biggest problem with Tropic Thunder is that it both mocks and reaffirms common Hollywood tropes at the same time; it acknowledges and makes fun of the need for "x" number of laughs, "y" number of big stars and "z" number of actions sequences and then throws all of those things into the film just the same. A recurring joke in Tropic Thunder has Speedman's agent Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey) fighting for his client to have a TiVo on location. It is meant to show the audience the foolish things that stars want (or that agents convince stars that they want), and yet watching the film one is utterly convinced that at least one of the actual stars of Tropic Thunder demanded something equally foolish.
The film also contains good work by many of the secondary and tertiary actors involved, including, most notably, Nick Nolte and Tom Cruise. Nolte plays the war vet who wrote the book Tropic Thunder which the film within the film is based on, and does a fantastic job as the gritty, hard-nosed Four Leaf Tayback. Cruise, in a good deal of make-up, takes on the role of Les Grossman, the head of the studio making the film. Cruise, every time he appears, is both hysterical and truly charismatic.
The Blu-ray release of Tropic Thunder is an unrated director's cut (as all things seem to be these days) and contains the usual assortment of behind-the-scenes features, the vast majority of which are in high-definition. It does however go one step beyond that however, with Rain of Madness, which is a fictional behind-the-scenes documentary with Justin Theroux (one of the co-writers of Tropic Thunder) starring as the documentarian and focusing on the making of the fictional Tropic Thunder. It runs for approximately a half-hour, and while funny, pairing it with the actual making-of features and having the real film have the same name as the fictional film is enough to make someone slightly dizzy. Additionally, there is an alternate ending to the film which falls completely flat and makes one very happy that it is only an "alternate" ending and not the real one and some deleted/expanded scenes.
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