Tropic Thunder Review

The opening run of fake trailers is the best five minutes and doubles as the thesis: this is a film about how completely actors believe their own marketing. Stiller then does something few comedies bother with and hires John Toll, a cinematographer with two Academy Awards for real war films, so the jungle looks expensive and the helicopters look correct, and the joke of pampered men in genuine danger only works because the danger is photographed seriously.

Robert Downey Jr. is playing an Australian method actor who has surgically darkened his skin to take a Black soldier's role, and the part survives because the film never once lets him be the one who is right; Brandon T. Jackson is in every scene puncturing him. The Tom Cruise material is a separate short film that happens to be very funny. Where it stumbles is the middle, which becomes a real hostage plot the satire cannot feed on, and Jack Black's arc is written thin. The industry material is savage in a way studio comedies almost never are about their own employers.