Tropic Thunder arrived in 2008 as a war film that hates war films, a comedy about actors that has no patience for actors, and a studio satire that bites the hand that greenlit it. Ben Stiller directed it and wrote the screenplay with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen. It runs 107 minutes. It is an action comedy, a war comedy, and a movie with a tagline that tells you exactly what it thinks of itself: “Get some.”
The premise is a joke that keeps unfolding. A group of self-absorbed actors set out to make the most expensive war film ever. Costs balloon, the studio cancels the movie, and the frustrated director refuses to stop shooting. He leads his cast into the jungles of Southeast Asia. There they meet real bad guys.
That is the whole engine. Everything else is the cast refusing to learn the lesson.
Trailer, via JavaLogical.
Five Actors and One Director Who Cannot Control Them
The film within the film is an adaptation of “Tropic Thunder,” the memoir of handless Vietnam veteran John “Four Leaf” Tayback. It is shooting on location in Vietnam. The cast is a disaster.
Tugg Speedman, played by Stiller, was once the highest-paid, highest-grossing action star alive thanks to the Scorcher franchise. His popularity has faltered after he tried to go serious. He now has a reputation for box office bombs. His role in Simple Jack, a farm boy with an intellectual disability who can talk to animals, drew negative coverage. He takes Four Leaf Tayback as a last-ditch attempt to salvage his career.
Kirk Lazarus, played by Robert Downey Jr., is an Australian method actor and five-time Academy Award winner. He had a controversial “pigmentation alteration” surgery to temporarily darken his skin so he could play the black character Staff Sergeant Lincoln Osiris. He refuses to break character until he has recorded the DVD commentary for a part. He only speaks in his character’s African-American Vernacular English.
Jeff Portnoy, played by Jack Black, is a drug-addicted comedian-actor known for playing multiple parts in films that rely on toilet humor, particularly flatulence jokes. In the film-within-a-film he plays a raspy-voiced soldier named Fats. He fears audiences only find his movies funny because of his farts and nothing else.
Alpa Chino, played by Brandon T. Jackson, is a closeted gay rapper. Kevin Sandusky, played by Jay Baruchel, is the supporting actor — the only one who shows up prepared. Damien Cockburn, played by Steve Coogan, is the inexperienced director who cannot control any of them. A $4 million pyrotechnics scene is wasted.
Studio executive Les Grossman, played by Tom Cruise under heavy makeup, gives Damien an ultimatum: get the cast under control or the project is canceled.
Four Leaf Tayback’s Advice and a Land Mine
On Four Leaf’s advice, Damien drops the actors into the middle of the jungle with hidden cameras and rigged special effects explosions to shoot guerrilla style. They carry guns that fire blanks, a map, and a scene listing that leads to a helicopter at the end of the route.
They do not know they have been dropped in the middle of the Golden Triangle, home of the heroin-producing Flaming Dragon gang.
Just as the group is about to set off, Damien steps on an old land mine and is blown up. The actors are stunned. Tugg believes Damien faked his death to push the cast into better performances. He assures the others the director is alive and they are still shooting. Kirk is unconvinced but joins the trek anyway.
Four Leaf and pyrotechnics operator Cody Underwood, played by Danny McBride, try to locate the dead director. Flaming Dragon guards capture them. Four Leaf is revealed to have hands. He confesses to Underwood that he actually served in the Coast Guard sanitation department and has never left the country. The memoir, the war record, the whole thing is a lie.
The Cast, in Order of How Badly They Misread the Jungle
The ensemble is doing several jobs at once. Each actor is a parody of a real Hollywood type, and each fake trailer at the top of the film is its own small masterpiece of mockery.
- Tugg Speedman’s trailer is for Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown, a spoof of long-running summer action franchises.
- Jeff Portnoy’s trailer is for The Fatties: Fart 2, a juvenile family comedy about a family that enjoys passing gas, with every member played by Portnoy.
- Kirk Lazarus’s trailer is for Satan’s Alley, about two homosexual monks in 12th-century Ireland.
The ensemble cast includes Nick Nolte, Danny McBride, Matthew McConaughey, Bill Hader, and Tom Cruise.
A Production That Was Itself Enormous
Stiller developed the premise during the production of Empire of the Sun in the spring of 1987. He later brought in Theroux and Cohen to finish a script. The film was greenlit in 2006 and produced by Stuart Cornfeld, Stiller, and Eric McLeod for DreamWorks Pictures and Red Hour Productions. It was an international co-production between the United States, Germany, and the United Kingdom.
Filming took place in 2007 on the Hawaiian island of Kauaʻi over thirteen weeks. It was the largest film production in the island’s history.
The marketing campaign was its own production. It included faux websites for three of the main characters and their fictional films, a fictional television special, and the sale of the energy drink advertised in the film.
Where the Joke Actually Lands
Tropic Thunder parodies prestigious war films, specifically those about the Vietnam War. It parodies the Hollywood studio system. It parodies method acting. That is three targets, and the film hits all three, though not with equal force.
The studio satire is the sharpest. Grossman’s ultimatum is not a cartoon. It is how the business actually works, and the film knows it. The method acting satire is the most quoted, and Downey’s performance is the reason. He plays a man playing a man, and the film never lets you forget the distance. The war film parody is the loosest. Once the actors are in the jungle with blanks, the film becomes an action comedy, and the satire thins out.
The structure has a real problem. The first act is a comedy about making a movie. The second act is a comedy about surviving one. The third act has to resolve both, and it does so by escalating. That works more often than it should.
The Running Order the Film Keeps
| Section | What Happens |
|---|---|
| Opening | Faux trailers for Scorcher VI, The Fatties: Fart 2, and Satan’s Alley |
| Act One | Production on “Tropic Thunder” collapses; Damien gets the ultimatum |
| Act Two | The cast is dropped into the Golden Triangle; Damien dies |
| Act Three | Four Leaf and Cody are captured; the lie is exposed |
| Ending | The actors must use their acting to survive real danger |
What the Film Gets Right and What It Dodges
The casting is the film’s best decision. Downey’s Lazarus could have been a single joke stretched past breaking. Instead the character has rules — the pigmentation alteration, the refusal to break character, the DVD commentary condition — and the rules keep generating material. Black’s Portnoy is a smaller part, but the fear that his audience only laughs at his farts is a real piece of self-loathing, and Black plays it straight.
Cruise’s Grossman is the film’s most efficient creation. He is in a handful of scenes and he owns every one.
Stiller’s Speedman is the hardest role because he has to be genuinely pathetic and genuinely funny at once. The Simple Jack backstory is the film’s darkest joke, and it is the one that has aged the worst. The film is aware that the industry punishes actors for taking risks. It is less aware that it is also making the disability the punchline.
The script, by Stiller, Theroux, and Cohen, is dense with bits. Some land. Some are just noise. The faux trailers are the best example of the film’s method: take a real genre, exaggerate one element, and let the exaggeration run for ninety seconds.
What Tropic Thunder Is Worth
Tropic Thunder is a 71 out of 100 on Metacritic. It is a comedy that understands the business it is mocking, and it is funniest when it stays in that business. The jungle section is where the film becomes ordinary, and the ending is where it becomes conventional. But the performances — Downey, Cruise, Black, and Stiller himself — carry it past its weak stretches.
The film’s real subject is not Vietnam. It is the lie that actors tell themselves: that the performance is the same as the experience. Four Leaf Tayback never left the country. Tugg Speedman never fought a war. Kirk Lazarus never stopped being an Australian man in dark makeup. The film knows all of this. It just cannot decide whether to laugh at them or with them, and that uncertainty is the most honest thing in it.
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