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Tropic Thunder Our rating: Your rating: 1 2 3 4 Your Comments: see all MPAA rating: R (for pervasive language including sexual references, violent content and drug material) Genre: Action, Comedy Theater release: August 13, 2008 by DreamWorks SKG Directed by: Ben Stiller Runtime: 1 hour 47 minutes Cast: Ben Stiller (Tugg Speedman), Robert Downey Jr. (Kirk Lazarus), Jack Black (Jeff Portnoy), Brandon T. Jackson (Alpa Chino), Jay Baruchel (Kevin Sandusky), Matthew McConaughey (Rick Peck), Steve Coogan (Damien Cockburn), Nick Nolte (Four Leaf Tayback), Danny McBride (Cody), Bill Hader (Rob Slolom) Related: Talk About It/Family Corner

Very few people saw Empire of the Sun when it came out 21 years ago, and possibly even fewer people remember it. But the effects of that World War II film—one of Steven Spielberg's most underrated efforts—live with us still. It introduced the world to a 13-year-old kid from Wales named Christian Bale, who has since conquered the box office as The Dark Knight. It also featured a young man named Ben Stiller, in one of his very first roles, as a prisoner of war named Dainty. And it was while working on that film that Stiller first got the idea for Tropic Thunder.

Directed by Stiller from a script he wrote with Etan Cohen (not to be confused with Ethan Coen of the Coen brothers) and Justin Theroux, Tropic Thunder concerns a bunch of actors who are working on a Vietnam War epic—a genre that was, itself, very popular in the late 1980s. Things are going very badly on the set, though, so their exasperated director, tired of fighting over the script and how to interpret it, drops them in the middle of a jungle rigged with explosives and hidden cameras, hoping to catch some genuine emotions instead. Naturally, however, the actors get lost—and when they stumble across a heavily armed drug cartel, at least some of them assume that they have met some fellow actors.

Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., and Jack Black

So the movie is, on one level, about art imitating life, and about life imitating art, but it is also about the lengths that people will go just to get a movie made, and to win the fortune and glory that might come with it. As such, the film is a sometimes blisteringly funny send-up of the movie industry, but it also raises some interesting questions about the nature of acting that, coming from these people, feels not only like good-natured self-mockery but also just a bit like confessional soul-searching.

The film begins with a series of fake ads for movies and products that are associated with the actors who have been dropped into the jungle. First up, rapper Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) promotes a beverage with a somewhat lewd name. Then, action hero Tugg Speedman (Stiller) stars in the umpteenth sequel to a movie that had a somewhat ridiculous premise to begin with. This is followed by a trailer for the flatulence-heavy antics of comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), plus a trailer for an earnest melodrama about gay monks starring Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), an Oscar-winning Australian who is very, very serious about getting into character.

Tugg Speedman and Kirk Lazarus

Thrown together on the set of their Vietnam War movie, all of these actors are out to prove one thing or another. Tugg worries that his days as an action-movie star are coming to an end, and he hopes to prove himself as an actual thespian; Jeff is battling drug addiction, and the fact that an animal steals the stuff he brought with him into the jungle sends him into serious withdrawal; and most significantly, Kirk has had his pigmentation treated by a doctor so that he can pass himself off as an African-American. The fact that Kirk insists on talking like a black man from the 1960s, even when there are no cameras rolling, gets on the nerves of his genuinely black co-star Alpa Chino, who fires back with a series of Aussie stereotypes. (No one, incidentally, asks Alpa Chino why he is named after an Italian-American actor.)

Thrown into the jungle and left to their own devices, it is Kirk, interestingly, who is most alert to the fact that they are surrounded by genuine peril. He may have a weird obsession with staying in character—at one point, he says he won't be dropping it until he has recorded the DVD commentary—but he is also very aware of the distinction between artifice and reality, and he is extremely articulate when it comes to explaining the "tools" that an actor uses. Tugg, on the other hand, has been involved in so many special-effects movies that he assumes everything around them is an elaborate prop; at one point, he even drinks the blood from a severed head in an effort to "prove" to his castmates that it's really only corn syrup.

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