To peg “Tropic Thunder” as a satire of moviemaking is to limit its anarchic, outlandish appeal. It’s like saying “South Park” is about an elementary school.

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Ben Stiller (left) and Robert Downey Jr., transformed into a black man, are shown in a scene from "Tropic Thunder."

Tropic Thunder

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Rated R for pervasive language including sexual references, violent content and drug material

Length: 107 minutes

Released: August 13, 2008 Nationwide

Score: 3.0

Cast: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Steve Coogan, Jay Baruchel

Director: Ben Stiller
Producer: Stuart Cornfeld
Writer: Etan Cohen, Justin Theroux
Genre: Comedy
Distributor: DreamWorks/Paramount Studios

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“Tropic Thunder” is a comedy about pampered actors on location in what proves to be an actual combat zone. It’s also about clueless Americans blowing stuff up, then being celebrated back home for their “triumph.” It’s a movie that ends with the devil — in the person of a bald, fatsuit-enclosed, Wookiee-hairy Tom Cruise — in command, dancing to Ludacris atop the graves of the dead and piles of filthy lucre (metaphorically speaking). Cruise is Les Grossman, a foul and malignant studio executive, but he could be any real-life warmonger, energy magnate or political opportunist; the pantomime of his sneering terpsichore tells us he’s confident that power to the people will remain a slogan, not a strategy.

Fast and witty and almost as gargantuan as some of the movies it spoofs (including “Apocalypse Now” and “Platoon”), “Tropic Thunder” takes place mainly in Southeast Asia, where fading action-movie hero Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) — the star of “Scorcher” and its five sequels — is trying to reignite his career and gain some dramatic credibility by appearing in an adaptation of a Vietnam War memoir penned by hook-handed veteran ‘Four Leaf’ Tayback (a typically hoarse and grizzled Nick Nolte). The name of Tayback’s book, of course, is “Tropic Thunder.”

The other actor “soldiers” in Speedman’s movie platoon include fresh-faced young hopeful Kevin Sandunsky (Jay Baruchel); “hip-hop hyphenate” Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), a rapper known for his “Booty Sweat” energy drink; corpulent junkie comedy star Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), trying to break free from his flatulent “Meet the Fatties” franchise; and five-time Academy Award-winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), an Australian method actor who has undergone a “pigmentation alteration procedure” to portray street-smart African-American soldier Lincoln Osiris. “Man, I don’t drop character until I do the DVD commentary,” says Lazarus, who acts like a refugee from a Fred Williamson blaxploitation movie even when off camera. “I don’t read the script, the script reads me,” is another of his “method” secrets.

Williamson played a soldier in the 1978 war movie “The Inglorious Bastards,” a film being remade by Quentin Tarantino, and “Tropic Thunder” has something of the movie-conscious, Mad magazine wackness of Tarantino’s “Kill Bill” and “Death Proof” films. With its remarkable ensemble of caricatures-as-characters and willingness to exploit violence as slapstick, “Tropic Thunder” also suggests a more generous and less hermetic Coen Brothers comedy. The script, however, is credited not to Ethan Coen but to Etan Cohen (“Idiocracy”), along with Stiller and Justin Theroux (the actor who worked with David Lynch in “Mulholland Drive” and “Inland Empire”).

When “Tropic Thunder” joins the making of the movie-within-the-movie version of “Tropic Thunder” in progress, the production already is “one month over schedule five days into shooting.” To save his job and energize his spoiled actors, director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) drops his cast in the jungle, abandoning his ambitions for a “Blair Witch”-style “guerilla” shoot. “You are no longer actors in a movie,” Cockburn bellows, on the way to the remote location. “You are five men in a helicoper. With three other men.”

The “soldiers” soon are lost in the “Golden Triangle,” Southeast Asia’s infamous center for opium production, where life predictably imitates art when the actors must adapt their “Tropic Thunder” training to combat a ruthless army of heroin producers, led by a boy potentate (Brandon Soo Hoo) who is a big fan of Speedman’s failed Oscarbait performance as a mentally retarded man in “Simple Jack.” The script’s references to “retards” have generated some pre-release controversy, but advocates for people with learning disabilities should find something worthier to protest; the target here is the pretensions of movie stars who think that by adopting a stammer they can understand the problems of the people they portray.

In addition to being a behind-the-scenes movie spoof (a genre that can trace its origins back to silent shorts with Charlie Chaplin, Harold Lloyd and Felix the Cat), “Tropic Thunder” works as a comic variation on such suspense films as “Southern Comfort” (National Guardsmen stalked in the bayou) and various “Missing in Action”-type movies. Stiller directed, and if “Tropic Thunder” is too grandiose and audience-friendly to be as startling as his once underappreciated 1996 film, “The Cable Guy,” it’s still a remarkable performance.

The movie is exhilarating, and everyone in the cast (including the lately annoying Jack Black and Matthew McConaughey, in perhaps his best role since “Dazed and Confused”) seems energized by the material. The blackface, resurgent Downey is especially memorable; following “Iron Man,” the film should cement his status as Hollywood’s Most Valuable Player for 2008.

— John Beifuss: 529-2394

movie review

‘Tropic Thunder’

Rated R for violence, drug content and pervasive profanity and crude language.