![]() Jackson, regularly remind you that the movie knows Downey/Lazarus/Osiris is a joke.) Broad reaction shots from Alpa Chino, played by Brandon T. ![]() (To ensure that this bit of patent offensiveness has a context, the Tayback epic also features an actual black actor, a raucous rapper hawking his energy drink - "Booty Sweat" - and aspiring to movie stardom. Per stereotype, Lincoln hates The Man and deploys "colorful" slang. Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is an actor's actor, and this time he's taken his neo-Method approach an extra step, surgically altering his complexion to play African-American sergeant Lincoln Osiris. Now, Tugg has signed on for Tayback's grunts-in-the-jungle movie, where he's competing for screen time with much-awarded Australian star Kirk Lazarus. Tugg has failed to jump-start his career by playing what he refers to as a buck-toothed "retard" in Simple Jack (a patently offensive venture). His Tugg Speedman is a fading, franchised action hero: "Here we go again, again," Tugg announces in a coming-attractions come-on for the sixth iteration of Scorcher - one of several smart-ass "trailers" that open Tropic Thunder with something like a bang. It's nothing if not arch, with Stiller front and center as yet another version of his patented neurotic-loser character. So if you think it's too bloody, too annoying, too nonsensical, well, good for you: That's exactly what it means to be. If it's not exactly original, it is loud and cocky - and that's usually enough to power a would-be box-office heavy through a summertime opening weekend.Īnd anyway, that premise adds up to something like a pre-emptive strike: Tropic Thunder is making fun of an industry that makes movies like. ![]() This is the premise of Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder, an expensive, star-studded action spoof of the traditional expensive, star-studded action flick. The gnarly soldier's solution: Take the "pansy-ass actors" into the jungle and abuse them until they cough up something like a convincing film. Trapped on the set of a big-ticket Hollywood adaptation of his Vietnam War memoir, John "Four Leaf" Tayback (a snarling Nick Nolte) is not a happy man: Somehow, less than five days into production, the project is already a month behind schedule. He also co-wrote, co-produced and directed the film, which pokes fun at Hollywood excess and the lengths to which some actors will go in search of authenticity.Ĭalifornia "girlie men"? Vietnam vet John "Four Leaf" Tayback (Nick Nolte) has no tolerance for that sort. Stiller stars in the spoof as Tugg Speedman, a fading action-franchise star (think a younger Sylvester Stallone) who's desperate for a box-office smash. In Tropic Thunder, in theaters now, actors filming a Vietnam War epic in Southeast Asia get caught up in a real war with gun-toting drug smugglers. come back and talk about that experience and talk about how it changed their lives." "There seemed something ironic to me about the idea of actors. "They'd go off with some military adviser and have two weeks of camping out, getting shot at, learning how to shoot their guns and pretending to be soldiers. "It sort of became a staple," Stiller says. The inspiration: "the fake boot camps" many of his actor friends went through as they prepared to shoot one war movie or another. ![]() It's a movie about making a movie: Actor-director Ben Stiller says he first had the idea for the war-movie parody Tropic Thunder way back in 1987, when he played a small role as a prisoner of war in Steven Spielberg's Empire of the Sun.
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