One-trick pony

Tropic Thunder
15, Nationwide

Unrelated
15, Selected Cinemas

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Brendan O’Neill

The moment in the ‘grooming gangs’ debate that shamed Jess Phillips

Tropic Thunder is an action comedy which stars Ben Stiller, is produced by Ben Stiller and is directed by Ben Stiller, from a story by Ben Stiller and a screenplay by Justin Theroux…and Ben Stiller. So if, after this movie, you don’t feel properly Stiller-ed, I can’t think where you would go from here. I would also like to ask: how much Stiller-ing do you need? Whatever, it’s a send-up of Hollywood which starts rather dazzlingly — at last, a funny film that’s actually funny! — but then droops horribly, even becoming a victim of all the absurdities and excesses it is attempting to satirise. Still, at least it ends in a tiresome, protracted, slapstick shoot-out of the visually gross kind that I haven’t seen since… let me see… ah, got it!… last week’s Pineapple Express. I would also like to ask this: how many protracted, tiresome, slapstick, visually gross shoot-outs is a middle-aged housewife such as myself expected to sit through? One more, and I’m going to John Lewis and not coming out.

So, what do we have here? What we have here is the film-within-a-film conceit as we follow a group of actors on the set of a war movie — Tropic Thunder — being filmed in south east Asia. The actors are: Tugg Speedman (Stiller), a fading action hero; Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr), the multi-Oscar winning, ridiculously extreme method actor who, called on to be black here, has had his skin surgically dyed and Jack Black as someone or other who is basically Jack Black, as Jack Black always is, when he’s not impersonating Terry Scott, which he surely is. Anyway, the film, with its ballooning costs and egos, is not going well so the director (a manic Steve Coogan doing manic) decides to heighten cinematic realism by dropping the pampered stars deep into the jungle where, inadvertently, they encounter real baddies and real combat.