Dir. Ben Stiller, US/Germany, 2008,107 mins
Cast: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black
Review by Carol Allen
Stiller, who is co-writer as well as director and star on this, has come up with a great comedy idea, in which the gags come thick and fast. The story concerns a group of self-obsessed actors making a film about the Vietnam war. The mood is set at the beginning by a series of spoof trailers for the characters’ other films. Particularly funny is Downey Jr in what is obviously a heart-rending movie about a gay monk. We then move into the opening sequence of the film within a film, where the actors are shooting a gory, highly emotional and effects heavy battle sequence, which nails the genre spot on. Reminds one of Platoon in that you can’t hear a word anyone’s saying over the din. When the escalating costs and outsize egos of the cast threaten to shut down the movie, the inept, but pretentious, director (Steve Coogan in a small but explosive role) does a runner from the money men and takes his cast off into the jungle for extra realism, where they fall foul of and are captured by what these dumb actors think are real Vietcong, but who are actually drug dealers.
Downey plays Australian method actor Kurt Lazarus, who for the sake of his art has dyed his face and body black to play the hero’s Afro-American best mate. He’s funny but Downey, who’s a bit method himself, has adopted the ethnic accent with such enthusiasm that a lot of his what are probably good lines are difficult if not impossible to hear. Much funnier in that respect is Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa, a real black actor in the cast, who’s understandably really pissed off about a white man playing a black character. Stiller plays Tugs, an action movie star, whose career is on the skids after his last film, which bombed. In that, he played a mentally-challenged character called Simple Jack in the hope of getting an Oscar, just like Dustin and Daniel did. As it turns out though, the actors’ captors are great fans of Simple Jack and force him to re-enact the role for their entertainment and ours, as the character is deliciously wicked and politically incorrect. Black as gross out comedy star Jeff Portnoy, whose speciality in previous movies has been fat and fart jokes, fits nicely into the team, without going over the top.
Both as director and actor Stiller has got the tone just right, both in the way the film neatly sends up overpaid Hollywood actors who take themselves too seriously and in how he handles really bad taste jokes about limbs and heads being blown off, making them very funny without being gross. He’s also gathered an impressive supporting cast, which includes Nick Nolte, satirising his usual tough guy roles nicely as the Vietnam veteran writer of the book on which the film they’re making is based, Matthew McConaughey as Tugs’ agent and an unrecognisable Tom Cruise, heavily disguised with receding hair and prosthetics, who does a great turn as Les Grossman, a bullying, foul-mouthed Hollywood executive, who is going ballistic as things get more and more out of hand.
|
