by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2018 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
I picked out a movie from the DVD backlog called Tropic
Thunder, a curious spoof of war movies
whose auteur was Ben Stiller: he
not only starred but also directed, co-wrote the script (with Justin Theroux
and Etan Cohen) and had one of the multifarious producer credits that have
grown on modern movies like kudzu. The film takes place in 1999 and deals with
a film crew on location in Quang Tri, Viet Nam reproducing an event described
thusly in the movie’s opening titles: “In the Winter of 1969, an elite force of
the U.S. Army was sent on a top secret assignment in Southeast Viet Nam. The
objective: rescue Sgt. Four Leaf Tayback from a heavily guarded NVA Prison
Camp. The mission was considered to be near-suicide. Of the ten men sent, four
returned. Of those four, three wrote books about what happened. Of those three,
two were published. And of those two, only one got a movie deal. This is the story
of the men who attempted to make that movie.” The men who attempt to make that
movie include several actors with clashing agendas but similar prima
donna attitudes: Kirk Lazarus (Robert
Downey, Jr.), a serious actor with five Academy Awards and a penchant for
totally losing himself in his characters, who’s undergone a controversial “skin
pigmentation change” to play a Black character; Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller),
who’s become an action star with a series of films called Scorched which detail what would happen if the earth stopped
rotating on its axis but took a career nosedive when he made a film called Simple
Jack, a sort of Forrest Gump meets Dr. Doolittle about a mentally retarded (oops, “learning
disabled”) farm kid who talks to animals, which bombed both critically and
commercially; Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), who’s coming off a series of films
called Fatso Fart about a family
of oversized people, all played by Portnoy; Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a
Black rap star whose big hit is about women’s genitalia (“I Love Tha Pussy”)
but who’s really a deeply closeted Gay man (though we don’t learn that about
him until the movie is really over) and who’s naturally resentful that though
he’s in the film, its most significant Black character is being played by a
white actor; and Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel), who’s young, hungry and enough
of a beginner he takes his job seriously and doesn’t indulge in the antics of
his bigger-named co-stars.
Tropic Thunder does a lot of meta-movie tricks: after the usual program of trailers
to genuine movies we’ve come to expect to preface a DVD, the first thing we see
when we hit “Play” is … more trailers, these for the fictional films the
actor-characters of the film we’re about to see have made. (There’s a nice one
for Satan’s Alley, a medieval
costume drama in which the fictional Kurt Lazarus and the real Tobey Maguire
co-star as monks who have a forbidden affair with each other: an in-joke
reference to the film Wonder Boys,
in which Robert Downey, Jr. and Tobey Maguire were shown as Gay lovers … well,
as one-night stand partners, anyway.) All the actors are working for a crazy
British director named Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) who’s managed to fall one
month behind schedule after only five days of shooting, and who blows the
film’s big scene when Speedman and Lazarus get in an argument over which of
them should cry during a big scene, and as a result Cockburn (whose last name
is pronounced the way it’s spelled — the actual pronunciation is “Coburn” but
obviously a group of comedians whose stock in trade has been dirty jokes
couldn’t resist pronouncing the name to put the word “cock” in it) doesn’t have
the cameras running for the big combat scene involving three aircraft dropping
bombs and lighting up half the Viet Namese jungle and setting the other half on
fire. The film’s producer, Les Grossman (Tom Cruise, virtually unrecognizable
with a shaved head and glasses that, except for his goatee beard, make him look
like President Merkin Muffley in Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove), says he’s going to fire Cockburn if he doesn’t
gain control of the actors, and as a result Cockburn hits on a strategy: he’ll
wire the entire jungle with digital cameras and film the movies with the actors
not knowing, and thinking they’re in real danger.
Only Cockburn gets killed
almost immediately — he’s beheaded and the actors come on his severed head and
at first think it’s a prop (one of them gets his blood on his fingers and licks
it, thinking it’ll be maple syrup) — and the actors find themselves lost in the
jungle and facing a real enemy. At first I thought they were pulling the old
Harry Langdon Soldier Man gag of
having the actors run into a company of real Viet Cong who were stationed in
such a remote part of the jungle they didn’t get the word that the Viet Nam War
was over, but it turns out they have drifted out of Viet Nam into the nearby
country of Laos and stumbled on a drug cartel called the Flaming Dragon, whose
head is a 12-year-old boy and who manufacture one-eighth of the world’s entire
supply of heroin. The Flaming Dragon fighters are convinced the actors are
really agents of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration out to get them in
the jungle and destroy their operation, and they fire back with everything they
have — real bullets against the actors’ prop guns. The film consists of the
actors and the Flaming Dragon going up against each other, and scenes in which
Speedman (deliberately made up to look like the relatively young Sylvester
Stallone from Rambo) and Portnoy
are captured by the Flaming Dragon and Speedman is forced to put on his Smiling
Jack costume and re-enact scenes from the
film, since the Flaming Dragon members appear to be the only people in the
world who liked the film.
At one point the Flaming Dragon demands a $50 million
ransom for Speedman’s return, which they later raise to $100 million — and in
the film’s funniest and most viciously satirical scene, Les Grossman, to the
horror of Speedman’s agent Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey, also virtually
unrecognizable), does a dollars-and-cents calculation and figure that between
the life insurance policy they have on Speedman and all the money they can make
on reissuing his films as a memorial tribute, he’s literally worth more dead
than alive — and they bribe Peck into going along with not ransoming the actor by offering Peck his own private
jet. The actors finally escape the Flaming Dragon after Portnoy, a drug addict
who had concealed his supply in jellybeans and who was tempted to snort the
Dragons’ entire heroin production in one go, figures out how to get the Dragon
guards to sleep for 16 hours by shoving their faces into the pile of heroin —
and this gives the actors the chance to escape via the helicopter their special
effects team head has provided for them, though Speedman briefly says he wants
to stay with the Dragons because he’s found real meaning in his life with them
and even adopted one of them as his son — only when his “adoptee” tries to stab
him in the neck with a pen knife, Speedman realizes what’s up and gets the hell
away in the nick of time. The final sequence takes place at the Academy Awards
ceremony, where Speedman wins the award for Best Actor for Tropic
Blunder, a movie made about the fiasco of
filming Tropic Thunder which, in
a Seven Keys to Baldpate-style
metafictional ending, is the film we have actually just seen. After Tropic
Thunder was over, Charles said, “I don’t
know if I liked it or not” — which was my feeling exactly: I’m tempted to put
it in the good-movie-that-could-have-been-better category — it occurs to me
that instead of killing off Cockburn so early, they should have kept him alive
in a secret jungle redoubt, where he’s monitoring the output of the cameras
with which he’s wired the jungle and maintaining an almost god-like detachment
as he sits in front of the monitor screens and edits the movie in real time.
Charles described it as a meeting of the making-of-Apocalypse-Now documentary Hearts of Darkness with The Hunger Games, and that’s largely accurate (though my idea for the
film and Cockburn’s role in it would have made it even more Hunger
Games-esque than the film we have) and I
suspect his I-don’t-know-if-I-liked-it reaction came from the same source as
mine: the film is so relentless in its violence (even though Cockburn is the
only person we actually see killed) and shot so much like a serious war movie
that through much of it you don’t know whether you should be laughing. When the
lame fart jokes (it’s practically a law that you can’t make a comedy these days
without lame fart jokes — something for which I suspect the blame rests with
Mel Brooks, who did a tasteless but also screamingly funny fart scene in Blazing
Saddles which seems to have regrettably
inspired the next two generations of “comedy” filmmakers) and the other snippy
lines of supposed wit appear, they almost seem more like comedy relief in a
“serious” war movie (just as Buster Keaton’s Doughboys seemed to lose any sense of balance and become a
surprisingly grim look at war for something that was supposed to be a comedy).
It’s a weird movie that is perched oddly on the boundary between comedy and
drama, though it does avoid one
trap a lot of war movies have fallen into: the troops (and/or the actors
playing them) aren’t given sappy love-interest stories to play in between
battles. Tropic Thunder is also
the sort of movie that references so many other movies Charles and I both lost
count, and as an edgy war comedy I think I liked Hot Shots! Part Deux better (I’ve never seen Part Un) if only because it had elements of political satire
and it benefited from Richard Crenna repeating his role from the original Rambo — but it’s considerably better than most
so-called “comedies” today and its satirical observations on the movie business
and the whole cult of celebrity ring vividly true.
