Midway through Tropic Thunder – a movie that caught me by surprise by being the best R-rated comedy in ages – Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr., wonderful as always) lectures Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) on how to play an idiotic character without going too far. I paraphrase: “Don’t become an idiot in order to play an idiot.” Happily, Stiller heeded this advice while co-writing and directing Tropic Thunder as well.
Tropic Thunder treads that treacherous terrain of the spoof movie. Mel Brooks got it right with Young Frankenstein, very right indeed and in the same way Tropic Thunder nails it. Airplane got it right. Lately, though, the genre has traced a downward trajectory beginning with Scary Movie (pretty good actually), followed by Epic Movie (tagline: “We know it's big. We measured.”), and soon to continue with Disaster Movie (appropriately, its trailer was shown before Tropic Thunder and not a soul in the crowded theater even chuckled).
Epic Movie failed and Disaster Movie appears soon to follow because they aim to be stupid-fun movies, but end up being merely stupid, and without a clear idea of what it is they’re trying to spoof. Young Frankenstein understands the 1930s horror movies that inspired it so well that it could easily pass for being one of them – if it wasn’t for Gene Wilder and Madeline Kahn and Marty Feldman – and that is really smart.
Tropic Thunder opens amidst violent conflict – gunfire, helicopters, VCs emerging from hidden tunnels, grenades, bayonets, blood, lots of blood… umm, wait a minute; too much blood squirts out of a wounded soldier’s helmet, way too much. The realism has morphed into something more akin to Monty Python’s Black Knight. Then Speedman appears fleeing from a barrage of gunfire like Willem Dafoe in Platoon, except that heroic moment of self-sacrifice is replaced by spastic slapstick. I was laughing out loud and would continue laughing for much of the next two hours. In the same way that Young Frankenstein is a terrific old-school horror movie with a comic twist, Tropic Thunder is a terrific Vietnam War movie with a warped comic sensibility.
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