Ben Stiller must have had this film bottled up inside him for much too long, particularly considering his career in the last few years has consisted of family-friendly movies that fared no better than reading bedtime stories, like Madagascar and Night at the Museum, and getting embarrassed (on-screen and quality-wise) in last year’s The Heartbreak Kid. In his latest movie, Tropic Thunder, the comedy is so brash, so insolent that it hardly looks back at the damage it is causing to the face of political correctness. And that approach could not be more appropriate when the primary satirical subjects are war movies and Hollywood filmmaking.
The comedic premise is a rather clever one in which a group of actors trained to play soldiers in a Vietnam War movie end up encountering a gang of drug smugglers who mistakenly suspect that they are armed special forces from the DEA. From this, director Stiller and his co-writers, Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen (no relation to Ethan Coen) aim at a great many targets in various directions from greedy Hollywood executives to screenwriting and showbiz stardom to, in particular, method acting and its follies. Not all of them hit their mark but when they do, the laughs really stick.
One area in which the film consistently scores a consistent bull’s eye is the performance of Robert Downey, Jr. as Kirk Lazarus, who offers a critique of method acting through method acting. Some people’s hairs were raised when news spread that he was going to play an Australian actor who undergoes a surgical procedure to darken his skin and play an African-American platoon sergeant. Following up his great, career-reviving work in Iron Man earlier this year, it is a tribute to Downey’s skills as an actor that he perfectly modulates his eyebrows and his body so that the “impersonation” avoids being a silly caricature but a sly and constantly funny jab at an actor’s potential identity crisis after immersing into another character so completely on and off the set. He also gets the biggest laugh of the film (that sadly comes much too early as it is right in the beginning) in a fake trailer of a movie called “Satan’s Alley” where he plays a gay priest who falls in love with another priest played in a cameo by Tobey Maguire (an “MTV Best Kiss Award Winner” as the trailer duly points out).
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