TROPIC THUNDER
In Theaters: August 13th, 2008 RETURN TO MAIN SITE
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“Tropic Thunder” is a cruel movie. Just when you think it’s squeezed every last gasping belly laugh out of you, here comes another barrage of scathing hilarity. The picture is, among several other things, a bunker-buster assault on political correctness, and howls of unhappiness are already being heard from the usual PC precincts. But then how often can that be helped?
It’s a movie about the making of a movie — a blockbuster war epic set in Vietnam in 1969. This film within the film, which is also called “Tropic Thunder,” is a traditional tale of bloody heroism and great big explosions, with a motley cast of head-case actors. Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is a fading action star desperate for a comeback after an ill-advised bid for Oscar credibility — a movie called “Simple Jack,” about a, uh, developmentally challenged guy who can talk to animals — left him a laughingstock. Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is a blond, blue-eyed Aussie whose pompous commitment to his craft (”I don’t read the script; the script reads me”) has driven him to undergo skin-pigment alteration in order to play a black Army sergeant in the film. Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is the drug-gobbling star of a lucrative series of dimwit pictures devoted to a family of fat, flatulent buffoons. And Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is a rapper-turned-actor who also rakes in millions with his hip-hop energy drink, Booty Sweat. The fifth member of this odd squad, a kid named Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), busies himself trying to make sense of what the other four nutcakes are doing, with only intermittent success. source
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