Thursday, Aug. 14, 2008

'Tropic Thunder' is a boring blunder

By Edward Robertson, atomictown.com

Latest example of a movie with a Two-Face Trailer: Tropic Thunder.

The Two-Face Trailer is the stunningly original term I've just now coined for a movie where the ads look promising, but you can't escape the sense it has an equally strong chance to be terrible.

These movies are exciting. They're like getting a package from your hermit friend who's gone off his meds: it could be a chest of lost Aztec treasure, or it could be a box of deadly swarming bees.

The solution is to trick your best friend into opening this package first, then either shoot a sleep dart into her neck if the box is full of gold or steal her car and head for the Continental Divide if it's the bees. It's sad the world these days has forced us to choose between being blowgun-wielding poisoners or survivalist moonbats, but you know what they say, when life gives you lemons, go absolutely goddamn crazy.

The fictional production of Tropic Thunder should be a dream: based on a story of heroism during the Vietnam War, it's got a huge budget and an all-star cast. Instead, it's running behind schedule and over cost.

When tensions break out between action star Ben Stiller and award-winner Robert Downey, Jr., causing them to blow a $4 million take, the entire picture's thrown into jeopardy.

The harried director decides to throw his cast into the deep jungle and shoot the whole thing guerrilla style. It's a fine idea until the well-armed drug runners show up to take the Americans hostage -- and the cast still thinks they're making a movie.

From its first moments, Tropic Thunder really, really wants to be a satire. It wants to be a satire the way I want to learn how to walk again. Rolling out fake trailers for its three fake stars (Stiller, Downey, and Jack Black), it quickly caricatures them as Dumb Action Meathead, Obsessive Method Ham, and Lowbrow Joke-Machine.

Thing is, these and all the other broad types running through the movie are neither exaggerated enough to be ridiculous or specific enough to be insightful. I'm not talking "shock your brain so hard you can suddenly speak with forest animals and beat Zeus in a fistfight" insight, here. I'm talking insight that shows familiar things like worn-out Hollywood cliches in a way that makes them look strange and funny.

Example: we're aware most action sequels are bigger, louder knockoffs of the original, which was probably pretty damn silly to begin with. Stiller's character making a career out of five unoriginal sequels, then, isn't so much cutting satire as a toothless observation that hey! Hollywood recycles itself!

All would be forgiven if the rest of the script were funnier, but as written by Stiller (who also directed) and first-time screenwriter Justin Theroux, the jokes that connect -- and there are a few -- are critically outnumbered by the ones that fall flat.

This could have something to do with Tropic Thunder's saggy-assed pacing. I'm blaming the editing here. Its many side plots and characters go missing for long stretches that feel even longer when they're filled with wandering, humor-light dialogue.

While there's a lot that could be cut, it isn't a matter of run-time, either. Trust me, I'm not one to complain about long movies. I love being distracted from the vast sucking pit that is my personal life. I want to spend time at the movies. If there were a way to surgically remove my brain and replace it with a machine that projected movies onto the insides of my eyelids so all I could do was watch Pitch Black and The Departed back to back for the rest of my life, I would get that surgery--even if I had to pay for it through hard, honest work. Urgh, just gave myself the shudders.

Tropic Thunder would not make its way onto that machine's playlist. Its digs at Hollywood are too shallow and the rest of its laughs are too few and far between. By the time they try to add some depth to their characters by resorting to equally shallow psychology -- bogging down the drawn-out last act even more -- it's time to check your watch and know those theater lights have got to come on soon.

Grade: C