FILM: Tropic Thunder – Fun but flabby, and eats itself

The late, late, Tropic Thunder review – possibly in time for a DVD release, and the bigger multiplexes. Much of the first third of Ben Stiller’s comedy is unnecessary, and seems to exist largely for Steve Coogan, who gets killed so early on he becomes irrelevant. Why not just dump the actors straight in their jungle nightmare and fill in the blanks with the odd bit of canny dialogue? The film opens in a jawdropping all-action style that it goes on to spoof – lightly at first, before eagerly employing so many of the genre’s trappings that it becomes what it mocks. The budget is colossal, and overshadows the conclusion – explosions, pitched battles and the machinations of a drug-farming child. Boys with toys and all too much, too big.

The middle section lives up to its promise; Robert Downey Jr in blackface is superb, and the racial sparring with his actually black co-star is underused – this is the only point at which the film tests its limits. The ‘retard’ aspect, represented by Stiller’s action hero’s failed Oscar bid (in the role of a Dr Dolittle farmhand called ‘Simple Jack‘), is a must for lovers of the politically incorrect but occasionally veers into the blunt unfunniness of such genre clonkers as Sports Movie, aka The Comebacks (a little better than Epic Movie, Disaster Movie, etc…praise so faint you need a microscope to see it).

As the jungle frenzy hits its stride with Stiller murdering an endangered animal, it is cut-off – too quick, too quick. An all too brief musing on the actor’s mask and some spectacular makeup is all that really follows. In the back of it all is Tom Cruise as a bald, evil movie mogul with enormous hands and a taste for salacious R&B. While often called a cameo, it is much more than that; a flat-out rendition of the sinister and the terrible, culminating in an extraordinary thru-credits dance sequence that mesmerises the mind. Cruise is no stranger to playing the unpleasant (see Magnolia), but that shouldn’t detract from his comedy tour-de-force here. It’s not enough to like it simply because it’s ‘bold’ for him not to play the hero; like it because he’s damn good at it. A shame that can’t be said for the rest of the movie.