When the production goes a month behind schedule in its first week, studio boss Les Grossman (an amazingly funny Tom Cruise), communicating via video phone call, tears a brand-new orifice for the struggling Limey director, Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan). Cockburn, desperate for advice, takes a tip from Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), the grizzled vet who wrote the movie's source book. Cockburn dumps his five leads into the jungle (they include one nonstar: Jay Baruchel as Kevin Sandusky) and says he'll the shoot the film with hidden cameras. When Cockburn kicks off his new plan of guerrilla filmmaking, he places his troupe right onto the path of real guerrillas - members of a vicious drug clan with a base deep inside the Golden Triangle.
Self-absorbed thespians put in extreme jeopardy produce genuine potential for a comedy of terrors. For a few split seconds, when everything whirls out of control, you experience the rare exhilaration of not knowing where the action will be heading in a Hollywood genre film. The comedy, though, contracts too soon. It centers exclusively on the delusions of actors and the incongruous spread of American mass entertainment. Stiller and his collaborators do color in some cunning turnarounds. At one point, Tugg appears headed for a fate similar to Tony in Evelyn Waugh's A Handful of Dust, who was destined to read Dickens aloud to a loony hermit in the jungle. Yet too many of their choices, especially one involving gruff, hard-bitten Four Leaf, defang the action.
