After feeling like a jackass for braying a good deal through Step Brothers, I was made to feel even more defensive by my brother when we stepped foot out of the theater and he commented on how obnoxious it all was, how it had mistaken loud for funny. I involuntarily accused him of housing a stick in his posterior, the knee-jerk response to such mirthless reactions. I fear I could receive the very same accusation concerning my reaction to Ben Stiller’s bombastic assault on already thoroughly lampooned Hollywood shortfalls in his fourth undertaking as director, Tropic Thunder.
It didn’t help that I happened to seat myself directly in front of and directly to the right of a pair of howling fellow theatergoers who saw that the film was sharply in need of a running commentary for which only they could provide. And they did so, with capacious regard for the other members of the audience, bestowing such rarefied insights as “What a dumbfuck!” and “That shit’s crazy!” as well as dutifully repeating particular lines from the film that may have been inaudible due to their prior ejaculations, crucial though they might have been. Perhaps a less busy screening might improve my opinion of Tropic Thunder, but that would require a desire to see it a second time, and be assaulted a second time. Even without the refined contributions of the gentlemen behind me, I found the obnoxiousness of Tropic Thunder to fill the glass of my patience to the brim, and then continue on pouring with another hour to go, overflowing the glass, sopping the tablecloth and drenching the floor, which was then slipped on by the film. Tropic Thunder slips on itself, big time. Tom Cruise appears as a furry, bald, gold-chain-wearing creep of a movie producer, and he is hilarious. But then the movie keeps pointing at him and saying, “Funny? Eh? Huh? Huh? Funny!? Am I right?!” Cruise’s character, Les Grossman, a vile man who threatens a woman on the phone with “I will rip your tits off” and who hurls other inventive scatological threats at various underlings, is shown advising Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller)’s agent (Matthew McConaughey? Yeah, it’s him) to embrace the future, and proceeds to lift the gold dollar sign hanging on a chain around his neck, and dangling it, gyrates like a back-up dancer in a rap video. Ben Stiller, apparently being unaware of the advice, “Leave the audience wanting more” has Grossman chain-dangle and dance again at the end of the film, over the credits for Christ’s sake, and shows it and shows it, until not only is it not funny, it’s flat-out embarrassing. But by then, I was too exhausted to be that irritated by it. Exhausting would be the most concise way to describe the feeling of seeing Tropic Thunder.
The film wants to satirize loud, insanely out of control war movies, but I have about as much faith in Stiller as a director as I do Michael Jordan playing baseball. Now using an analogy like that is dated, yes? Jordan played minor league baseball, badly, back in 1994. That’s a lame analogy on my part, but is it as lame as a comedy released in 2008 making fun of Willem Dafoe’s protracted and grandiose death scene from 1986’s Platoon? Yeah, Ben Stiller does that, and it’s probably been something he’s been planning since he was 21. Yes, that scene deserved to be poked fun at, but doing it 22 years later just makes me wonder how fresh and “daring” such a comedy is that would contain such an expired jab. The hype and the word of mouth purported that Tropic Thunder would excoriate and take-no-prisoners in its quest to hand the movie industry its ass. What it does is give the movie industry a noogie.
The movie begins with 4 faux advertisements: the first a spoof of raunchy, crass rap videos, which has been done already on The Onion, on SNL, on “The Boondocks” and various other [adult swim] cartoons, on Mad TV…; the second a trailer of a dumb action movie with 5 sequels; the third a trailer spoofing The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps (2000); the fourth spoofing self-important art-house type period pieces. Only the last one is really inspired. It features Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire as two repressed monks casting suggestive looks at one another under a chorus of choir-techno. The title: “Satan’s Alley.” As for satirizing actors that play mentally handicapped roles in order to win Academy Awards, I direct you to the first episode of Extras: Season 1: been there, done that. If you find yourself utterly disengaged from the movie while watching it, just try thinking of where the hand-me-down jokes that are being presented as if they are cutting, razor-sharp attacks on the vanity and wastefulness of the movie industry originated from.
The rest of the movie hits easy targets and is about as funny and clever as a regularly scheduled episode of Saturday Night Live, only with a bigger budget, and more dirty talk. Most of these “inside jokes” had no teeth by the time they showed up on Entourage. I laughed here and there, and there were mitigating factors, but how this got a 72 on Metacritic leads me to believe that in the low standards of August, shooting fish in a barrel is welcomed more than just leaving them alone, even if they’ve already been shot dead.
Grade: C
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