Movie Review: Tropic Thunder

As a big Ben Stiller fan, I had great expectations for Tropic Thunder. The premise is a bunch of cocky actors playing in a military movie end up having to fight for real. A movie about a group of guys making a movie. Come on, this has got to be hilarious, right? There's Stiller, playing the self-absorbed action hero, Tugg Speedman, whose career is declining after several sequels (which are all essentially the same) to his original movie, The Scorcher. Jack Black plays Jeff Portnoy, an Eddy Murphy-like comic (note spoof within the spoof movie The Fatties where Jeff plays all the characters) with a pension for heroin and known for his fart gags. Then there's Robert Downey, Jr. playing Kirk Lazarus, an Australian classically trained award-winning actor known to lose himself so much in his characters, he almost becomes them. This time around, he'll undergo skin treatment to play a black man. Oh, the gall, Stiller! However, the real black man in this movie is Brandon T. Jackson, who plays Alpa Chino, a rapper-turned-actor, trying to hawk his Booty Sweat products and deny his feelings for Lance Bass of NSYNC. Finally, to round out the group, there's Jay Baruchel, playing Kevin Sandusky, the actor nobody's heard of and the only one who can read a map. There are even real websites for the fake actors(e.g., www.tuggspeedman.com,www.kirklazarus.com, www.jeffportnoy.com, www.alpa-chino.com).

There are other characters that need mentioning. Tugg's agent, Rick Peck, played by Matthew McConaughey, who has to choose between a plane and a bunch of cash or saving his client's life (by bringing the Tivo to the Asian jungle promised in Tugg's contract). There's Four Leaf Tayback, the war veteran who wrote the book that was the premise of the movie within the movie, aptly played by Nick Nolte, who turns out to be a fake. And finally, there's Less Grossman, the ego-maniac psycho movie producer, played by none other than Tom Cruise.

Ben Stiller, how my husband loved you in Zoolander and Mystery Men. This should be freaking awesome, right?!

Wrong. Why? I don't know why Ben Stiller stabbed my heart, stomped on it, spat on it, and put it in the meat grinder. I don't know why all the reviewers are lying to you and telling you it's the funniest thing ever. Maybe if I was an actor, this would be funnier. Maybe that's the problem. The fake trailers of course brought chuckles. There were chuckles throughout. The problem is there was never any big guffaw. Just chuckles. Nothing that made me laugh out loud. Even Stepbrothers made me laugh out loud. My husband, who is even a bigger Stiller fan than me, tried to be encouraging as he said after the movie, "Well, it was better than Rush Hour 3." O.M.G. I wanted to cry.

The only redeeming quality this movie (supposedly a comedy) had (which I can't believe I'm saying) was the performance by Tom Cruise as Les Grossman. He was dead-on with this character who adroitly cursed out (I'm talking major F-bombs) a bunch of Viet Cong holding his actor, Tugg Speedman, for ransom as Les demanded Diet Cokes from his underlings.

In summary, it sounds great, but it isn't. Wait for the DVD, and rent Zoolander too.