Tropic Thuder review

Thats right i promised you guys this, you extreme 4 or so readers that we have (god bless ya)
Here is my review of Tropic Thunder (to be honest a film i've been wanting to review for a while but i thought i'd wait a while until i was in the perfect mind frame to review it because i want this one to be good+ i did forget sometimes)


The idea behind Tropic Thunder is that there are a group of actors filming a war film that goes badly and then they are put into a real war situation to make everything more believable and have to save themselves from Korean drug farmers at the same time.

Tropic Thunder showcases some laugh out loud moments and is all together enjoyable but holds on to a story that seems to be nothing more than the idea that is presented to the audience in the trailer or at the start of the movie, the problem with this is that the movie doesn't seem like it's going anywhere. Luckily Tropic Thunder isn't a poor excuse for a plot that has awful jokes bursting out from every unwanted crevice, but if it wasn't for this films general idea being quite inventive yet simple and the few laugh out loud moments it would create a tedium of just Ben Stiller trying to be funny (which i'm sure a lot of people might accept he really can't do as well anymore).
A lot of the reason that this film can be considered memorable is for the fake trailers played just before the movie (used for the actors played by actual actors in the film) especially because one of which features a superb cameo from Tobey Maguire, it is because of these trailers that there is an averagely significant glimmer of hope that Ben Stiller can still spawn some originality and turn it into something.

Robert Downey's Jr. in a way represents the whole of the movie extremely well, in the way that his character is an excellent idea and concept but lacks the hilarity to fully bring out that concept but is funny enough to make the idea a proposition of an amusingly easy film to sit and watch.

As with most Ben Stiller films the film seems to take a strange direction away from what the idea of the film seems to be and leads to something that is out of place and could perhaps work well as a sketch but because of a lack of relevance loses out on perhaps the true humour of it, in Tropic Thunder this happens quite frequently with idea's such as Jack Blacks character being a drug addict and Ben Stiller's characters previous film about a retarded farm hand 'Simple Jack' which quite frankly takes a lot of the focus of this being a war comedy (though these minimally link in with the plot the jokes don't).

I cannot say i'm dissapointed with Tropic Thunder because it does entertain but more just upset that such a good idea was not saved until a better script came along (though Ben Stiller had the idea for this film for half his life).

In short Tropic Thunder has a very worthy plot but the script lack of jokes and often lack of relevance help to steer this film away from being something brilliant, but nevertheless the material offered still entertains.

Rating: ***
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