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Ben Stiller heads back to the director's chair with 'Tropic'

'Tropic Thunder' has it all: big action, big laughs and big stars.

by Collin Sherwood Elwyn | Freelance Writer |

PUBLISHED ON 8/14/08 IN Pulse

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Media Credit: Courtesy of Dreamworks

No one in Hollywood seems to be suffering more at the hands of the Apatow factory than Ben Stiller. The likes of Will Ferrell, Steve Carell and Seth Rogen have reinvented the comedy industry, a fact that Stiller was rudely awakened to in 2007 when his "The Heartbreak Kid" remake flopped. In order to return to his winning ways, Stiller is doing something that he hasn't done since 2001's "Zoolander": directing his own movie.

"Tropic Thunder," Stiller's return to the director's chair, is the story of three major film stars and the Vietnam War movie that they set out to make. The trinity of actors is headlined by Tugg Speedman (Stiller), an action movie star whose career is quickly spiraling downward. Joining him are Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a comedian who makes Adam Sandler look like Socrates, and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), a five-time Oscar winner fresh off a controversial procedure designed to darken the pigment of his skin so that he can play the squad's African-American lieutenant.

The combination of the trio's prima donna character traits, the film's absurdly large budget, and the inept helming of first-time director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), leads people close to the film's production to call it a disaster after only five days of filming. Fearing for the quality of the film version of his story, author of the fact-based source material "Four Leaf" Tayback (Nick Nolte), urges Cockburn to fly his stars to a dangerous part of the jungle. Unfortunately for them, the danger turns out to be real, as the director and his stars find themselves unwittingly encroaching on the territory of some particularly violent drug manufacturers, eventually creating a war of their own.

As "Tropic Thunder" is at least in some ways a movie about movies, the references to silly war movie clichés and direct allusions to classics of the genre seem almost innumerable, ranging from "Apocalypse Now" to "Platoon." Also near uncountable is the number of celebrity cameos, a dangerous play for any movie that takes itself even a little bit seriously. Thankfully, "Tropic Thunder" does not.

Much like "Pineapple Express," "Tropic Thunder" is a comedy that doesn't pull punches on the action front. In fact, a tremendous amount of the film's enjoyment depends on the viewer's ability to find excessive gore funny and ironic. In the theme of its blood-spurting jests, the movie is at its best when it is at its most tasteless.

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