Tropic Thunder
Man am I surprised very how friggin funny this movay I done seen just was! (How's that for a bad sentence? Eat it grammar police! Take that, fancy wordsmith New Yorker magazine movie critic or whoever! I stompidy stomp all over your precious english! I unzip my half-wit education and mix up your words all scrambly style and have my way with them. When I type in Word it's underlining shit like a mofo! I'll even make words up if I find it to be extra prefelent! And add them to my own dictionary just to be a dictk! You got it easy! You got editors who sit there going over your words and fixing them up all upright! The only editor I gots is in my head and he sucks! He just skims and then just signs off on crap! He knows worse than me! But I persist in typing anyway and give glowy movay reviews to movies that I bet your thunked sucked! Well, I didn't think this movie sucked! I thought it was pretty high-flyingly excellente. Take that, biatch! All this shit in parenthesises too!)
Anyway, I seriously thought I knew exactly what this movie was going in. I pre-judged 100%. The required forty minutes of very funny stuff followed by a tip over a cliff and freefall into terribleness finally dragging the first 40 minutes down with it like an anchor chain around the ankle. Robert Donney Jr's black guy thing would be funny for a stretch but then get annoying. Ben Stiller's yelly half-stupid meanface would be been-there-done-that. Jack Black would be instantly annoying and grind gears just to drive the point home. And side characters like Tim Cruise and Nat Nolte would just ham around just thinking they were funny. The plot would be an absolute mess. The 'movie set' thing would become ridiculously unrealistic-- and on top of it all it would go on for wayyy too long. Maybe they'd even mix in a love interest just to be an asshole about the whole ordeal. I was looking forward to a good 40 minutes.
Shockingly, for the first time in a long time I was totally wrong. This movie is the funniest movie I've seen in a while for sure. One main reason is it just played it all very loose. It wasn't all force feedy or tried to be something it wasn't. It didn't try to do too much. Sure the actual plot had no reality to it. It's a dumb movie for sure. Dumb concept too. But it's a step up from the cart-before-the-horse school of self-awesome clowning that crudflicks like Step Brothers and Get Smart splash around in. Where they assume themselves to be funny without really bothering to make an honest go of it. (No I've seen neither of those movies.)
But this flick crrranked. The blindfolded and arms-out plot worked fine with me. The action was pretty friggin good too. The stray wobbily sideplots didn't flag my attention for too long. The star-power wasn't sickening. It actually carried this thing. But of course the anchor was Robert Donney Jr. who amazingly is probably the biggest actor in the world right now along with being the best. I seriously think I could have sat there and watched him run errands in that character for two hours and I would have walked out smiley. (Without him this movie would have probably dudded). Yadda, Ben Stiller did his thing where he forces me to laugh even though I fight hard to resist falling for his old tricks. Undergood is Jack Black who got handed a cornball fart filled character and left out in the wind to twist in his underwear. I thought he was only really funny when tied to a tree. But whatever!
So there. I'm surprised. Shocked even. I've been real nitpicky with stuff lately but somehow this flick kept slapping my little mental notebook out of my hands with just straight out funny crap and funny goofball action. Even now, as I think back on it to re-remember stuff that bugged me... there isn't much I'm latching onto. I just can't grab a hold of anything to really smack it around. Let me think. There's gotta be something. I don't know. Maybe Tom Cruise overstayed his welcome by a minute? That's all I got right now.
Three Good Things About the Movie
- Hate to harp and bandwagon but for fuks sake Donney is good.
- The whole thing dipped into good old fashioned crazy now and then.
- From the opening fake previews to the dancing at the end. The thing is just
satisfying.
Three Bad Things About this Movie
- I wasn't crazy about the kid king.
- I laughed way hard at the 'retard' lecture from Donney.
- I don't have any desire to see it again.
All in all, this is the funniest movie of the summer. The whole thing has a cool vibe of goofy big kids playing with giant toys. It also takes fun cutesy kitty paw swipes at hollywood. Yeah, there's an strong undercurrent of dopey throughout-- but it's easy enough to just grab a raft and float along with it. I just dug it. Yeah, maybe more than this movie deserved. Or maybe I was just in a good mood going in which gave this flick a big head start. But I don't remember being in a good mood when I left the house-- I just remember this movie putting me in one...