Something Completely Different--A Movie Review

Tropic Thunder—Icono-classless

by James A. Bridge

Tropic Thunder is one of those movies that makes one wonder how a talent like Ben Stiller cannot tell when he's up to his neck in untreated sewage.

Or, why he thinks he needs to make his point about Hollywood's foibles by dousing his audiences with buckets of filth.

And talk about reaching backwards—this film is a send-up of a send-up in criticizing the 1979 classic Apocalypse Now, and the 1991 documentary “Hearts of Darkness—A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse”, with quite a few cute pokes at other Nam flicks, notably Platoon (1986) and Hamburger Hill (1987).

Tropic Thunder's doesn't stop with an F-Bomb assault—it sneaks every last expletive and blatant sexual act reference past our apparently brain-dead Motion Picture Association of America film censors' board—hey, MPAA, what the heck are you doing over there? There is practically no place where Ben Stiller's runaway pen doesn't take us, that is, in the realm of offensive language and general bad taste. But Ben had help—the “original story” came from himself and Justin Theroux, and Etan Cohen joined them in this icono-classless act. We can’t blame the MPAA for that—it’s our fault for putting up with it.

They stop at nothing. They tackle the effete politically crowd at the knees, taking on the mentally deficient (dare I say retarded?) when Stiller as Tugg Speedman reprises his fictional film flop, "Simple Jack". Robert Downey Jr. plays Kirk Lazarus, an Aussie playing a black man, and his take on a stereotype is good, and funny at times. They don’t say “nigger” anywhere in the film, and it would have been the least offensive thing I would have heard in that 107 minutes. Ben Stiller’s Tugg Speedman throws an offensive orphan off a bridge (it’s all fine, folks, the kid survives and gets a laugh). Matthew McConaughey’s character Dick Peck, Speedman’s agent, laments being stuck with his own mentally deficient child. And on. And on. And on.

Did I mention Jack Black as the drug-addicted hack actor, Jeff Portnoy? My, what a stretch. And the “real” black man in the movie, Alpa Chino (get it? Al Pacino? another insider's gag that is more annoying than entertaining), played by Brandon T. Jackson? Nick Nolte, as the somewhat odd Four Leaf Tayback, the supposed Vietnam veteran who wrote the supposedly true story, but actually was a sanitation engineer in the Coast Guard? They don’t add much to this film, but maybe I’m expecting too much in 2008.

Stiller and his fellow mallet-wielding writers savage Hollywood’s movie-making industry with practically every breath. Blatant lout of a producer Les Grossman, played by Tom Cruise, is portrayed as repulsively as a character can be played, and his dialog bristles with Fs. Feckless director Damien Cockburn, played by Steve Coogan, is that ubiquitous British director that doesn’t know what the hell he’s doing—and that gag seems again to be a writer’s inside joke. Like Dick Peck's insistence on delivering a TiVO to the jungle shoot, because Speedman’s contract says he’s supposed to have one. Smash! Crash! Sacred Cows in splinters and ruin everywhere, and in so doing, this trio of writers make like the opening chimpanzee act of 2001-A Space Oddysey.

Iconoclasm is one thing. But just the sheer fact that Ben Stiller is intentionally beating into a pulp everything about the movie-making industry does not excuse him, in my eyes, for this assault upon our ears and sensibilities. To call this screenplay and libretto sophomoric would be to pay it a compliment it does not deserve. Tropic Thunder is the filthiest, vilest stab at comedy I’ve ever sat through.

And believe me, I didn't just ride into town in a turnip truck. I grew up around seamen and marines. There isn't much I haven't heard.

Tropic Thunder is too much to take, and we really have to wonder if we want our young people to believe that this kind of language and offensive humor is acceptable. I look around the audience told me that many were breaking the rules of the “R” rating by being in the theater. Ben, you've certainly succeeded in telling us all how foolish the rating system is, since they clearly didn't stop you from saying a blessed thing. This is not humor, though, Ben. This is trash, and you are directing your animus at a young audience that is far from getting the thrust of your Hollywood bashing. They think that you think this highly offensive film is actually FUNNY.

Yes, there were funny moments, and precious few of them. I won't give them away. They are like finding a glass of water in the middle of the Sahara at noon in August—you don't even care if it's cold, you are so desperate for a drink. There is no sustained humor in this movie, just a kind of dread of what the next offensive stream of dialog or monologue will be. Tropic Thunder isn't “Something About Mary”, “Meet The Parents” or “Keeping The Faith”. This will be remembered as one of the worst movies ever made. When the audience that loves it today grows up, or sobers up, they’ll watch it again and know I’m right.