Well... at least it's a good ad for Hawaiian Tropic!
There’s a fitting epitaph for just about every war (and just about every war movie) “It seemed like a good idea at the time!” Tropic Thunder is perhaps best described as the coming together of a great number of very good ideas… that, once together, all of sudden didn’t appear that good.
     Basically Tropic Thunder is a comedy about a bunch of overrated and overpaid Hollywood actors making a film about the Vietnam War. It may have been the right idea but they picked the wrong war. Two of the greatest war movies of all time — Apocalypse Now and Full Metal Jacket — were about Vietnam. The guys who put Tropic Thunder together should know, if you can’t move a story forward you’re taking it backwards.  
     Tropic Thunder, I am pleased to report, bucks the recent Hollywood trend of mediocrity. It gets an A Plus for effort and a B Minus for execution.
     It’s really hard to know where to begin with Ben Stiller’s fourth directorial attempt at a full length feature film. How’s this? Tom Cruise’s was the standout performance.
     Cruise plays the fictitious Les Grossman the fictitious studio boss who’s bankrolling the fictitious film that is the subject of the fictitious Tropic Thunder. Without wanting to overburden my readership with facts, Cruise’s management, while happy for him to play the role, directed the folks at DreamWorks NOT to release any images of him in character and makeup?
     Their reasoning was quite sound, Cruise had to wear a fat suit, complete with a disgustingly hairy chest piece and a tragically balding scalp. Now, get this, Cruise’s management thought being seen like this could damage his image. Hello!!! Your’s is the guy who jumped up and down on Oprah’s couch; who featured in that whacky Scientology video; who got canned by Paramount for his whacky views; is full of unhelpful and unwanted advice for mental illness sufferers and expectant mothers; has been through more wives than Mission Impossible sequels; and keeps suing media outlets for suggesting he’s gay! And his people think a photo of him in a fat suit will hurt his image?
    I will say this about Cruise’s performance in Tropic Thunder: it was pretty good. He was funny and entertaining, he was playing a total caricature of a film studio boss and he never overplayed it. In fact every character in this film was a caricature of some other player in the movie business. The only problem was Cruise was the only guy who nailed it. At times Cruise was so maniacal in his ranting and raving you could have easily imagined him as L. Ron Hubbard pitching Dianetics to Hermitage House in 1950.
     The rest of the guys in the cast just… just… well, they just fail to deliver. Ben Stiller clearly learned a lot from working with, comic genius, Larry David on Season Four of Curb Your Enthusiasm; but used none of what he’d learned in this film.
     Robert Downey Jr, potentially a smart bit of casting: a white American actor playing a white Australian actor portraying a black American soldier… but it turns into a 107 minute sight gag. Jack Black plays a B grade comedy actor struggling to overcome a coke addiction — and he didn’t think to get any advice from Bob Downey? I thought Nick Nolte was actually very good in the role of Tom Wingo… but that was in Prince of Tides 17 years ago.          
     Though mainstream movie goers would have enjoyed the series of spoof movie trailers and commercials that were thrown up on the silver screen before Tropic Thunder’s opening credits, slightly more discerning connoisseurs will realize that this idea was a pale imitation of Robert Rodriguez’s quite brilliant spoof trailers that prelude Planet Terror.
     As I pointed out at the beginning if you don’t go forward then you can only go backwards… which means only one thing, there will probably be a sequel!