As he showed in his short-lived comedy-sketch TV series, Ben Stiller has a gift for crafting show-biz lampoons that explode the boundaries between burlesque and satire, low and high culture, clowning and parody. One of the funniest things ever put on television was the skit he called "Woody Allen's Bride of Frankenstein," a take-off on Husbands and Wives with a cast of characters that included Frankenstein's monster and the Mummy. It slashed through Allen's psychodrama with a simple, brilliant stroke: Allen's characters often acted monstrously; in Stiller's parody, they were monsters.
The same iconoclastic brio that can make a sketch show sizzle doesn't always sustain a feature film, and Stiller's Tropic Thunder (he directed, co-wrote and co-produced it) is a prime example. It opens with an avalanche of freestyle riffs on American action and comedy franchises, segues into a sarcastic blitzkrieg against the emotional and physical excesses of Vietnam movies such as Apocalypse Now and Platoon, and ends up a barbed tribute to the fraternity of actors. The movie expands, then grows smaller. It never ceases to win big laughs, but it's like an accordion that keeps blasting as it shrinks to the size of a concertina.
Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a passe action hero who tries to revive his career with a rescue-mission war epic. Since he flopped at his last Oscar-baiting part - a mentally challenged character named, like his film, Simple Jack - he's desperate to succeed at Tropic Thunder. So he fills his cast with marquee players. Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), an Australian star and critics' favorite, brags that he never breaks character until he's done a commentary track for the DVD. Drug-crazed comedy superstar Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) has made millions from playing multiple flatulent roles in grotesque comedies about a family of fatties resembling Eddie Murphy's Klumps. Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is a one-man conglomerate who creates clothing lines and specialized items like his "Booty Sweat" energy drink. Chino wants to be the most authentic 'Nam-era brother in the movie - a vain ambition, since Downey's Lazarus has undergone a pigmentation process in order to play a black sergeant. And no one gets more real than Lazarus.
This kind of crazy farce thrives on danger and uncertainty. Seeing Tinseltown self-indulgence transported to Vietnam is initially a blast, on and off the set. It's hard to know who's more out-of-control: Tugg and Kirk, who try to out-emote each other, or Cody (Danny McBride), the explosions expert who adopts his own scorched-earth policy.
