Tropic Thunder

Friday, 11.20pm, BBC1 (2008) 15

Ben Stiller’s action comedy is based on Vietnam War films – from Platoon to Apocalypse Now – but as well as being a genre spoof, it is also a Tinseltown spoof, full of irreverent nods to Hollywood excess and vanity.

Stiller (who also directs, co-writes and co-produces) plays faded action star Tugg Speedman. He and a quartet of other faux stars are on location filming a fact-based Vietnam War film. Inexperienced British director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan), under menaces from wacky studio mogul Les Grossman (an unrecognisable Tom Cruise, inset), drops his stars in the middle of the opiate-rich Golden Triangle, expecting to capture documentary-style images of them on hidden cameras. Things go horribly wrong, however, and the talent are soon in very real danger.

While junkie comic actor Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) goes cold turkey and Speedman ventures into his personal heart of darkness, the film is buoyed by Robert Downey Jr playing, in his character’s own words, ‘a dude playing a dude disguised as another dude’. As Kirk Lazarus, Downey Jr is a serious, Oscarladen actor who stays permanently in character on set. A blond-haired, blueeyed Aussie, he has undergone a ‘pigmentation alteration’ in order to play African-American sergeant Lincoln Osiris. He is a knockout.

The jokes at Hollywood’s expense come thick and fast, some playing to type (the crippling self-doubt of the cast), others playing against (Matthew McConaughey’s soft-hearted agent). Yet for all the hit-and-miss gibes, we still end up caring what happens to the core cast – however shallow and self-absorbed. That’s the magic of Hollywood.

The story behind the film

The references to Apocalypse Now didn’t end with Tugg Speedman’s jungle fever. Along with various other mock marketing campaigns (including websites for the film’s fake stars), a trailer was released for a mock documentary called Rain Of Madness. This was, of course, a spoof of the 1991 documentary Hearts Of Darkness – A Filmmaker’s Apocalypse.