Merging reality and fantasy in a movie within a movie, co-writer/director/star Ben Stiller lampoons the movie industry in ways it hasn’t been skewered since The Player and S.O.B. In Tropic Thunder, a film crew sets out to make the biggest (and most clichéd) war movie ever. But after huge budget overruns and a tantrum from the studio head (an unrecognizable Tom Cruise), the hapless English director (Steve Coogan) decides what the film needs is a lot more realism. So, he plunks his all-male cast deep down into the jungles of Southeast Asia for some on-the-spot boot camp training. What starts out as an exercise turns disastrous when they encounter REAL enemy warriors trying to do them in. The motley crew of actors include: Tugg Speedman (Stiller), a fading action hero desperate for a hit; Australian five-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), who is such a method actor he undergoes a unique skin pigmentation transformation to play his character as an African-American; and Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), star of a successful farting comedy franchise called The Fatties. Also along for the shoot is intensely serious author John “Four Leaf” Tayback (Nick Nolte), whose book the movie is based on and who may have twisted the real facts for the sake of a movie sale. The bulk of the film finds them fighting for their lives without a script in sight.
Ben Stiller hasn’t been behind the camera since his hilarious Zoolander, but he hasn’t missed a beat in that department. He manages to make a balls-out action war film with more explosions than any movie in recent memory - obviously paying homage to such classics as Platoon - but doing it all in the service of a smart comic takeoff on the movie business he clearly knows well. There is thunderous laughter from start to finish in what will undoubtedly go down as the most outrageous comedy of the year.
