Tropic Thunder

Hollywood is obsessed with itself. I mean that beyond the obvious narcissism involved in its relentless promotion of stars and starlets who have this movie they just happen to be starring in opening this Labor Day weekend. It's just a part of the marketing to make an actor talk about what a character (written by someone else) means to them. Of course that's going to be very self-referential.



I'm referring more to when Hollywood decides that seeing a movie isn't enough. What audiences really thirst for is a movie about making a movie. It's not a few and far between occurence either. On IMDB there are 164 "Film Within a Film" movies, 366 "Film In Film" and 558 "Breaking the Fourth Wall" movies. Not all of them have been on par with Fellini's "8 1/2" either.

Tonight I went to see the latest incarnation of this phenomenon. Except "Tropic Thunder" is a film-within-a-film but also a BIG SUMMER ACTION MOVIE!!! So the intent is to make a bunch of inside jokes and observations about filmmaking that will be relateable to as many people as possible. Just beginning from that point while making a satire will doom you to taking limp cliches and calling them jokes. Which is exactly what "Thunder" does.

If fighting cliche with cliche is allowable, then my quick review is you see all of the best parts in the trailer. By the time Steve Coogan makes his "exit" from the film, the majority of the jokes have already been made once if not twice and they're coming back multiple times over the next hour and a half. "Thunder" plods along making points that a Pat Proft movie could've made a lot more efficiently and inexpensively while it also reminds us over and over how clever it's being. It's not a commentary about Hollywood as much as a bunch of ideas of what that might look like and the shadow versions were disappointing through and through.



The truth is I suspected "Thunder" would be a bad movie going in. Although he has made a bunch of really hilarious movies in the past, you can see in the trailer when Ben Stiller is going to be on auto-pilot and it looked like this was going to be one of those movies. However the movie was getting a lot of really good reviews and I felt it necessary to give it a chance in case my barometer was off. Sometimes its necessary to absorb a bad movie to know your sense is still accurate.