Movie review: 'Tropic Thunder' pours on the excess

Hollywood satire meets "Apocalypse Now" in "Tropic Thunder." Surely no movie-industry comedy has ever had a bigger napalm budget, more strafing helicopters or explosions on a par with this lunatic war movie satire.

Every aspect of Ben Stiller's new comedy is extravagant. The acting goes beyond over-the-top and into pole-vaulting territory. The physical gags are conceived on the grandest scale possible. The characterizations are sky-high caricature. The R-rated humor dances on the brink between rude audacity and true offensiveness. Each shot is designed to pin your ears back with sheer excess. It's overkill as punch line.

Stiller, Robert Downey Jr. and Jack Black play movie stars who don't realize that they've wandered off the set of their Southeast Asia war flick and into a dangerous nest of drug runners. The premise is as stale as week-old hot dog buns. It's "Three Amigos" with palm trees. Yet the sheer bombast of the $90 million production gives the idea a huge boost. The film-within-a-film scenes of battlefield carnage dwarf the intestine-strewn opening of "Saving Private Ryan," with gut wounds that flaunt more entrails than a butcher's display case.

Stiller plays Tugg Speedman, a fading action-movie idol. He's desperate to revive his career after a disastrous attempt at drama where he played a mentally retarded man in a heart-tugger titled "Simple Jack," widely considered the worst film ever made. Speedman's hoping for a comeback in a Vietnam War picture based on the memoir of hook-handed former POW Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte).

Downey plays Kirk Lazarus, an intense method actor who underwent a pigment transplant for the role of a black soldier, and refuses to abandon his down-home baritone off camera. ("Man, I don't drop character until I done the DVD commentary.") Black plays drugged-up comedy star Jeff Portnoy, whose lowbrow fat-suit farces have turned him into a self-loathing heroin addict.

The prima donnas overwhelm jittery director Damien Cockburn (English comedian Steve Coogan), putting the project a month behind schedule in just five days of shooting. Cockburn's solution: Drop the stars deep in the jungle, film them with hidden cameras and create a guerrilla-style masterpiece. Their make-believe shootouts become battles of blanks and bravado vs. live bullets when they anger the local drug lord, a macho, violent little boy (Brandon Soo Hoo).

Stiller, who co-wrote and directed, is generous to his co-stars, allowing Downey to scamper off with the acting honors. His performance as a guy playing a guy playing a guy is a layer cake of clever observation, politically incorrect daring and self-mockery. Black chews up the screen as a Chris Farley/John Belushi type on a drug-fueled rampage. Jay Baruchel plays a bright, nebbishy rookie actor, and Brandon T. Jackson is a rapper named Alpa Chino (say it out loud) who's anxious to cross over into movies. Jackson's testy debates with Downey over the authenticity of his performance are among the movie's comic treasures.

The film veers between action comedy and industry in-jokes at a manic pace. The pampered, neurotic actors fret about their performances while real machine-gun fire whizzes around their ears. Stiller's Speedman is a dimwitted hambone whose stardom hinges more on his buffed-up physique than talent; his ripoff of "Platoon's" iconic scene of a wounded soldier in the posture of Christ on the cross is a keen send-up of hey-look-at-me overacting.

Back in Hollywood, two-faced agents and vulgar studio heads get a vigorous send-up by two top stars whose identities, out of respect for the spoiler-sensitive, shall remain secret. Even movie trailers and elaborate promotional cardboard standees come in for their share of ridicule. The in-jokes, which might have been too obscure a few years ago, will ring true for anyone who has tuned in to "Access Hollywood" or surfed past TMZ.

"Tropic Thunder" works double duty. It's both a sharp satire of filmland's bigger-is-better mind-set and a prime example of the heavyhanded era it stands in.

Colin Covert • 612-673-7186