Tropic Thunder: Plenty of talent but the joke gets lost in the jungle

Tropic Thunder (15)

The first ten minutes of this are so hilarious, it's a mystery why the other 97 are so lacking in laughs.
The opening contains three fake movie trailers which establish the shameful back-story of the leading actors, and promise a rip-roaring satire on modern Hollywood.
Ben Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a pampered action superstar whose career is on the skids.

Lacking in laughs: Tropic Thunder degenerates into the kind of banal, bloated Hollywood action movie that it sets out to parody

We know this because we see extracts from his comprehensively failed bid for Oscar glory, Simple Jack, in which he played a mentally impaired farm hand who could talk to animals.
It was so horrible a flop  -  presumably as bad as Robin Williams's Jack  -  that Tugg's next movie, The Chitlin And The Dude, co-starred him with the world's worst comedian, Martin Lawrence.


Then there's Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), the fat, effeminate, drug-addicted star of The Fatties comedy franchise, in which he plays all the leading characters, every one of them noisily flatulent. You could say he's the white Eddie Murphy.
Finally, there's a trailer for Satan's Alley (a kind of medieval Brokeback Mountain), starring five-times Oscar-winning Aussie Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr) as an Augustinian monk tormented by homosexual feelings for a fellow-priest (a caring cameo by Tobey Maguire).
The funniest of all three trailers, and alleged 'winner of the Beijing Film Festival's coveted Crying Monkey Award', this shows Lazarus as a master of the martyred stare, the politically correct stance, the moué of a method actor with galloping narcissism. I hope Russell Crowe sees it.
Then we're into our main feature, which is about the making of a big, extravagantly dumb war movie starring all three actors.
The most ludicrously miscast is Kirk Lazarus, who has had his skin surgically dyed black in order to play Afro-American sergeant Lincoln Osiris, and refuses to drop out of character 'until I have completed the DVD commentary'.

This is much to the annoyance of the one genuine black man in the picture, Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a multi-millionselling hip-hop artist whose biggest hit was I Love Tha Pussy and who's heavily into his menswear line for Gap called 'Alpa Chinos'.
An early production catastrophe leads to incompetent British director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) being bawled out by foul-mouthed studio executive Les Grossman (an almost unrecognisable Tom Cruise, playing an obscene parody of Harvey Weinstein) for being $100 million over budget and a month behind schedule  -  no mean feat after five days of shooting.
Cockburn is encouraged by real-life Vietnam veteran John 'Four Leaf' Tayback (Nick Nolte) to shoot the rest of the film ' guerilla-style', with hidden cameras and microphones.
The only snag is that the actors fall foul of a heavily armed gang of Oriental drug-runners led by a machinegun- toting child soldier.
It's very uneven, with Black and Coogan competing to give the least funny performance. Coogan looks like winning early on, but is blown up by a merciful land mine, so Black's wearisome schtick carries on for much, much longer.
Best actor in the movie, though his diction makes him hard to hear, is Robert Downey Jr, with his opaque pronouncements on his craft ('I don't read the script  -  the script reads me').
His most memorable and controversial speech comes when he lectures Tugg Speedman on where he went wrong in Simple Jack.

Tom Cruise, pictured at the film's premiere, plays an obscene parody of Harvey Weinstein

'Everybody knows you never go full retard,' Lazarus tells him.
'What do you mean?' asks the bewildered action star.
'Check it out,' replies Lazarus. 'Dustin Hoffman, Rain Man, look retarded, act retarded, not retarded. Autistic, sure. Not retarded.
'You know Tom Hanks, Forrest Gump? Slow, yes. Retarded, maybe. Braces on his legs. But he charmed the pants off Nixon and won a ping-pong competition. That ain't retarded.
Peter Sellers, Being There. Infantile, yes. Retarded, no.
You went full retard, man. Never go full retard.
You don't buy that? Ask Sean Penn, 2001, I Am Sam. Remember? Went full retard, went home empty-handed.'
You could say that speech is in bad taste, and several people have  -  but it's a pretty accurate commentary on the way Hollywood romanticises mental disabilities and its stars shamelessly angle for Oscars.
The movie's funniest when skewering Hollywood from an insider's perspective.
However, the targets for the film's satire are a little too familiar: self-obsessed actors, status-crazy agents (Matthew McConaughey, stepping in for Owen Wilson after his suicide attempt, plays a memorably deranged one) and money-grubbing studio heads.
Cruise establishes Grossman as a terrific grotesque, but then doesn't know what to do with him except a funny dance, influenced by Ricky Gervais in The Office.
As in last week's Pineapple Express, the piece degenerates into pretty much the kind of banal, bloated Hollywood action movie that it sets out to parody.
Ben Stiller co-writes and directs, but this isn't as consistently funny as his last effort, Zoolander (2001).
His motto seems to be the one that drives the Hollywood directors whom he obviously despises: when all else fails, blow something up.
If you're going to criticise action movies for being ridiculously implausible, then you'd better make sure that the plot for your own film holds water. This one doesn't.
And it seems odd to make a spoof of war movie clichés that deals in crude racial stereotypes of the Asian characters, and revels in machismo to at least the same degree that the worst Oliver Stone movies do.
Verdict: Clever idea runs out of steam