Tropic Thunder: Jungle Feverish

If only Ben Stiller and company were as hot and naughty as the P.C. protesters complain

A A A Comments (0) By Scott Foundas Wednesday, Aug 13 2008

Merie Weismiller Wallace

Platoon for dummies

More About

So Tropic Thunder amounts to a passable evening’s entertainment for the Entertainment Tonight crowd, but little more. It’s handsomely made (the cinematographer is Oscar winner John Toll, who shot The Thin Red Line, The Last Samurai and, curiously, Francis Coppola’s Jack, which seems the not-so-hidden inspiration for Simple Jack) and sporadically amusing, but almost everything about the movie sounds sharper, funnier and smarter than it turns out to be. That’s especially true of Tom Cruise, whose ballyhooed supporting role as Tropic Thunder’s bile-spewing Jewish producer is effectively his excitable Magnolia performance covered up in a fat suit, tufts of curly body hair and a skullcap. It’s also true of Downey, who’s a consistent pleasure to watch but whose skin-darkening character functions solely as a piñata for actorly navel-gazing, effectively negating any possibility that Tropic Thunder might say something provocative about the film industry’s persistent ghettoization of black talent. That people are picketing this movie is fairly depressing and itself a subject fit for satire.