Tropic Thunder (It's Zoolander all over again)

Oh my God, SO bored. This is like day 14 with no work to do at work, and I'm at that point where I feel like I've seen everything on the internet that I would possibly want to see. And it's a gorgeous, cool, sunny day outside, making matters worse. How does this bring us to Tropic Thunder? Well, really just that it underlines for me how unexcited I am to write about this disappointing movie, but am turning to it as a way to fend off complete boredom.

My friend was super into seeing this from the ads, so I saved it for him. The movie opens with an ad for Booty Sweat, an energy drink from hip-hop star Alpa Chino, then has three fake trailers for movies by its stars. The first and least funny is the sixth sequel in which the earth becomes a steaming fireball, starring Stiller's character, Tug Speedman. The second is a parody of those Eddie Murphy comedies where he plays all the characters, with Jack Black's character, Jeff Portnoy. The last is a gay-monk movie, obviously based on Brokeback Mountain, called Satan's Alley. Surely you recognize that name as the title of the musical Travolta stars in at the end of Staying Alive. That one is starring Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Kirk Lazarus. We then have credits, and join our three actors in a Vietnam movie that is going badly. The director [Steve Coogan] is way over budget, and gets an angry call from Tom Cruise as Les Grossman, this big gross hairy blowhard studio head. Nick Nolte, playing the author of the book their movie is based on, suggests that the only way to really save this thing is to get the actors out there in the real jungle. This is exactly what they do, and one second later, the director is obliterated by a land mine, leaving them all out on their own.

Eventually it starts dawning on everyone—except Speedman—that they've really just been left in the jungle. They bicker. Portnoy, who is using heroin, has his stash taken away and essentially goes into withdrawal on the trip. Lazarus is a method actor and has had his skin surgically darkened to play a black man. He also keeps in this voice and persona he thinks a black man would have—and is often called on this by the real black guy on the mission. We periodically cut back to Hollywood for more of Speedman's agent, played by Matthew McConaughey, and Les Grossman, the best thing in the movie. Eventually the guys get into a real adventure and have to enact a rescue, that [sort of] satirically turns into the exact kind of adventure scenes reminiscent of their movies, and it ends.

So you're sitting there, laughing fitfully, thinking "This is not nearly as funny as I'd hoped it would be," and certainly isn't as satirical or movies or Hollywood or anything. Once it was over, my friend and I agreed that it was pretty much Zoolander, but in a different locale with a different idea. Only, Zoolander was better. A lot of the things I was looking forward to in this movie were, if not busts, then just seriously deflating. The Hollywood satire had no more bite than anything you might see on E! The whole thing of Downey playing a black guy had almost no content to it and pushed next to no buttons. Almost everything even commenting on this was in the trailer. The whole angle of mentally disabled people being mocked [there were protests outside my theater the night the movie opened] was a big nothing. Seriously, Tom Cruise was the best thing in the movie—at least he was really fun. It was all so middling and everyone so rote that my friend was inspired to say "I can't believe I'm saying this, but you actually look forward to when Tom Cruise comes on, because then you're seeing someone who knows how to act."

It wasn't awful—I was never bored and I laughed a few times. It's just that, given all of the ideas and all the stars and the whole concept, I had really hoped for a lot more. Stiller is fine as a director, but he still way overplays his fake acting, and everyone else doesn't make much of an impression. That is to say—here's a movie in which Robert Downey Jr. doesn't even really make AN IMPRESSION, and that's saying something. Hopefully Hamlet 2 will be good.