Dear Ben Stiller, please give up.
I saw Tropic Thunder last night. And I have to say that I am still trying to figure it out.
How? How do you take so many great ingredients and turn have the final product turn out that crappy?
They had some great ideas and talents working for them, but the fucked up the execution. They had great plot points, but terrible scenes. It was like they took Thanksgiving Dinner and made almost every bit of it wrong. They boiled the turkey, the stuffing and forgot to take the cranberry sauce out of the can. Ben Stiller, give up.
Here’s what worked:
- The unlisted superstar villain was great.
- Robert Downey, Jr. was good.
- The previews that start the movie (and give the character background).*
- The scene about actors playing characters with mental retardation.
- The rapper character and the nerdy character.
I would say that the idea worked, except that they did it all wrong. I would love to take the skeleton of this script and fix it. Because as it is, this is one of the worst movies I’ve seen. Maybe ever.
The problem is that it pulled every punch. Every time they got really close to making a point about Hollywood or the movie industry, they backed off and threw in something like fake rubber hands. And they completely wasted Jack Black. The part he played could’ve easily been done by the fat guy from Herman’s Head and it wouldn’t have made a difference. It was a complete waste of time and talent.
And they fucking knew it. The credits play over a sequence of the villain dancing. Why? Because they knew they hadn’t won the audience. I want my time and money and expectations back.
* unlike Austin Powers 3, where the first 10 minutes of the movie were hysterical and the rest of the movie was AWFUL, Tropic Thunder had a few laughs at other points. A few.