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Tropic Thunder

It was okay overall (not great, not bad) because it delivered enough chuckles.

• Structure/Plot

Act 1 was cute, and I loved the originality in the fake previews appearing before the studio logo bit. At the start of Act 2, however, I felt a collective letdown in the audience…a stretch of silence and discomfort that didn’t exist before that point. To me, it’s because the story had to set up so much and go so far out. We had to accept the filming wasn’t going well; the director lost control of the actors; the director was motivated by the Nick Nolte character to take the actors into the jungle; the director, Nolte and the weapons guy set up cameras and explosives around miles of jungle; that the video footage would somehow blend in with all the traditional filming till that point; the director died and Ben Stiller’s character thought the death was fake even after holding his head and tasting the blood.

Remove a few of those points and it could’ve been smoother: the jungle excursion could’ve already been a part of the director’s schedule…just moved up a few days in order to change pace and hopefully create comaraderie; the plan would’ve been for the director to quietly follow from a distance and shoot guerrila-style with a good camera; the actors would not have seen him die, but instead would have heard a gunshot and then seen his blood and shirt (or whatever)…creating the same kind of situation where Stiller thought it was part of the plan and the director was still hiding/filming and the others thought it was real.

• Little Things

I didn’t understand almost half of Robert Downey Jr.’s dialogue.

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Update: I saw the flick a second time, on cable a year after the theatrical release. While I still feel the same way about the setup, I’d like to clarify that this was one of the funniest movies I’ve seen in the last few years. And I finally understood the other lines from Downey, Jr.! It was also nice to see a comedy with such a solid structure, attention paid to theme, and time given to all the characters. Of all the other current comedy directors and writers, only Judd Apatow comes to mind as one who is careful about these fundamentals.

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