Tropic Thunder

Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is an action actor, Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is the classic funny guy actor and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr) is the oscar winning method actor who (to quote another of Stillers movies) is 'so hot right now.' All three of them plus some extras are shooting a film about the vietnam war. The director Damian Cockburn (Steve Coogan) is unable to control his pre madonna actors and so has to go to extremes to get a realistic outlook on this film. He takes them out of movie jungle and into the real jungle. From this point on it's every man for themselves as they assume they're still making the movie when in actual fact the troubles they face are real.

This review I think has been my hardest to write as I wanted so much to love it. I love Stiller and I adore Downey Jr so to pan them is a hard thing for me to do. Having said that.... yawn. I was bitterly disappointed with this film, especially when it had been praised by every review I had seen.

For one, the plot. Good idea, and poking fun at actors is always amusing to me but it was brought across in a very long drawn out way showing all the funniest bits in the trailers and leaving the rest of the film as a snooze fest. Now don't get me wrong, I did chuckle, even guffaw at certain jokes in this movie, but if you compared it to the amount of times I checked my watch?? Hmmmm.

For two, the actors. This was the part that upset me the most, if you know me at all I have always praised Ben Stiller for his comic genius (Zoolander, Starsky and Hutch etc) and yes maybe in the recent years I've drifted away from his type of humour.... but I've still seen every film he's been in. This film however, knowing that he starred, produced and directed it came off as dry and very poorly drawn out.

Downey Jr is one that it grieves me to pan ever since I watched him in Ally McBeal and my teenage heart beat wildly for him. Buuuut again I was disappointed. He played someone who had undergone a pigmentation skin operation so that he could play an American black man and being a method actor he played his character 24/7.... bad move. I could not understand a single word he was saying, and it was fine when I thought that was meant to be the general idea but when he's having a conversation with someone and I'm only able to listen to one side of it, it is incredibly annoying. If he was going to play this role then surely he may have learnt how to enunciate!!

And finally Jack Black whose sole purpose (other than to get more bums on seats due to another big name) was to fart and come off drugs, nothing else. Boring and done way too many times before.

Perhaps it was because I expected something better, perhaps it was because this just wasn't my type of humour, but I was unimpressed. (As you may well have gathered) and that's why it gets a mere two faces from me.