Little White Lies magazine

An unsubtle swipe at Hollywood vanity, Tropic Thunder is a war comedy that packs in as many star cameos and industry jokes as it possibly can. Perhaps writer/director Ben Stiller thinks that if you throw enough shit jokes at a movie audience some of them will stick. Sadly, we’ve seen it all before. And the sheer density of lazy gags makes the whole film seem slightly desperate; any comic timing is lost in the relentless stream of ‘funnies’ ranging from the absurd to the even more absurd.

The slight plot is little more than a line from which jokes about ego-driven celebs can be hung. It sees a group of dumb-ass actors – Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr as a black man – filming the titular overblown war flick in Vietnam, unknowingly crossing over the border and ending up in conflict with a local teenage warlord. A couple of inspired moments aside – Stiller being warned by Downey Jr that you can never go ‘full retard’, this is as subtle as a sledgehammer to the face.
 
But Tropic Thunder’s saving grace is, ironically, its one genius, genuine star turn. Not Stiller. Not Black. Not Downey Jr. We’re talking about Tom Cruise, popping up as a Sumner Redstone-esque movie mogul complete with paunch, bald head and grotesque, hairy, sausage-fingered hands. With The Missile launching into tirades of swearing on anyone unlucky enough to be in his vicinity, it’s a brave, brilliant, self-deprecating performance from one of the best representatives of Hollywood’s mainstream megabucks movies. Cruise hurls himself at the role, and Stiller realises he’d hit on something special – extending the cameo and letting him boogie the movie to the final credits.