PREMIERE'S REVIEW (posted 8/7/08)

Some artists defy the corporate infrastructure that threatens to co-opt their work; others wryly deconstruct it from the inside out. Ben Stiller falls into the latter category. His performances in forgettable studio comedies sustain the illusion of an actor satisfied with sub par product, allowing for submergence in the processes he breaks down as a remarkably talented and wholly consistent filmmaker in films like Tropic Thunder.

In the quartet of films Stiller has written and directed since the early '90s, he's maintained a sharp focus on the pratfalls of media saturation. Reality Bites depicted the chaotic television industry, providing a training ground for what came next; The Cable Guy is brilliantly subversive. Watch it again; in threatening to destroy everything Matthew Broderick's Chip holds dear, Jim Carrey becomes the invasion of television incarnate. Zoolander mocks the vapidity of the fashion industry. Now comes Tropic Thunder, a combination of these themes that serves as an indictment of pompous celebrity culture and the country's slovenly entertainment interests. Each of the familiar faces in the cast ridicules his own place in the landscape of American movies. No women appear in Tropic Thunder, but that only enhances the satiric effect: Populated with bad ideas, Hollywood has gone sterile.

Taking cues from the infamous disasters on the set of Apocalypse Now, Stiller tells the story of a bad Vietnam War movie plagued by set troubles. The eponymous production takes its inspiration from a memoir penned by alleged Vietnam vet John "Four Leaf" Tayback (Nick Nolte, natch) about a handful of grunts and a virtually unstoppable hailstorm of bullets. Stiller's Tugg Speedman beefs up to play the heroic Four Leaf, riding his hopes on the prospects of the macho role after "going full-retard" in an earlier miscalculated attempt to get an Oscar nomination. Robert Downey Jr. spends nearly the entire running time in blackface, driving his hip-hop co-star Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) to deliver a hilarious and shrewd anti-discrimination tirade. Jack Black, as the lowbrow comedian known for his flatulence jokes, basically riffs on himself. As the drug-addicted Jeff Portnoy, he hopes to defy audience expectations by taking a serious role, not unlike Black's own goals with King Kong and Margot at the Wedding. The whole lot winds up doing their characters in real life when the frustrated director (Steve Coogan) drops them in the middle of the jungle in order to inject some much-needed intensity to the production. Needless to say, a few very real acts of violence later, the cast comes face-to-face with clandestine drug lords and must fend for their lives, not for the film. But those two goals are indistinguishable.

Presiding over the movie (and the "movie") is Tropic Thunder's magnificent secret weapon, Tom Cruise. Buried in a ridiculous bald wig and sporting a forest of chest hair, he portrays the heartless studio mogul Lev Grossman, whose greed dooms the production. A clear-cut act of revenge against Paramount executive Sumner Redstone, who had a public falling-out with the actor last year, the performance implicitly critiques bureaucratic insanity (thanks to the savvy screenplay by Stiller and Justin Theroux) and audience perceptions of Cruise himself. It's a Saturday Night Live sketch in rewind — the actor parodies your expectations of him.

From Downey Jr.'s purposely racist embodiment of African-American anachronisms to Black's scatological humor, everything in Tropic Thunder qualifies as satire, not spoof. It's an important distinction. Pauline Kael once noted that "unlike satire, spoofing has no serious objectives; it doesn't attack anything that anyone could take seriously; it has no cleansing power." Thus, the movie opens with inane fake trailers to introduce its fictional stars, surpassing the ones in Grindhouse for espousing actual ideas. Stiller offers a catharsis for everyone overburdened by bombastic storytelling, but even when the movie becomes playfully self-reflexive, it remains a keenly layered narrative. He returns to the movie-within-a-movie-within-a-movie metafilter so many times that the gimmick forces you to pay close attention and believe in the events as they transpire, without sacrificing the absurd edge of the equation. Jumping back and forth between Grossman's office and the jungle, Tropic Thunder recalls the comical dread of Dr. Strangelove, where Stanley Kubrick cut between the war room and a nuke-wielding B-52. This one could have the subtitle How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Blockbuster.

by Eric Kohn