Stiller fires on Hollywood

IF THE New Yorker's Obama cover had folks fired up, Robert Downey Jr.'s turn in "Tropic Thunder" might cause actual spontaneous combustion.

Downey plays a vainglorious, Oscar-endowed method actor so determined to get under the skin of his latest character, a black man, he has his pigment medically ebonized. Kind of a reverse Michael Jackson.

He also sports an Afro wig and Walt Frazier sideburns suited to his character's biography - platoon leader in the Vietnam War.

This is a war not known for generating movie comedies, and maybe that's why "Tropic Thunder's" opening scene is so disconcerting - one soldier tending to another as a jet of blood spurts from his head. The volume of blood is meant to be farcical, but even as a joke it feels tactless, and you wonder how it could possibly be softened by context.

Writer-director Ben Stiller eventually pulls back to show us what he's up to. It's a big-budget movie set, full of overpaid and generally bad actors doing an appalling job of bringing substance to material beyond their grasp and ability.

Everything is going wrong - the spurting blood, the "controlled" explosions, and the director (Steve Coogan) has lost control of his all-star cast. Downey's decorated method actor is openly disgusted with his co-stars - an overmatched action star (Stiller), a fart-movie comedian (Jack Black) and a rap performer whose stage name is Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson). What's more, an angry studio exec (a showy Tom Cruise with fat padding and a fake bald spot) is threatening to pull the plug.

The desperate director decides to abandon the big-budget approach and go guerilla, taking his pampered cast and a few hand-held cameras into the jungle, where they encounter (oops) real narco guerillas - whom the clueless actors initially mistake as extras.

"Tropic Thunder" plays this situation for slapstick laughs, and gets a few. The bigger laughs, though, come from Stiller's more ambitious ideas - an acid satire of moviemaking hubris, especially where it intersects with biography/history.

Stiller has said the idea for "Tropic Thunder" has been germinating since the '80s, when as a young actor he had to listen to colleagues talk about the life-altering experience of attending combat boot camp.

Stiller attacks the self-serving insularity of this attitude, and comes close in "Tropic Thunder" to suggesting that any attempt to make a movie about war is morally obscene (the apparent meaning of that opening sequence).

He doesn't really follow through with the idea, though, and the movie's wavering courage makes for wildly uneven experience - the highs are high, the lows low. Black's turn as a heroin-addicted actor going through withdrawal, for instance, never gets going.

The funniest stuff comes in Stiller's informed, caustic commentary (he co-wrote it with actor Justin Theroux) about the big-time actor's "art." When the movie hits, it hits hard - as when Downey's character explains the nuances of playing a mentally challenged man to the lunkheaded action star, who is trying to bounce back from the career disaster of "Simple Jack," a movie about a slow-witted farm boy who can talk to animals. His observations about the difference between "Forrest Gump" and "I Am Sam" are shrewd, if you can get past the offensive language.

And Downey's neo-minstrel show is improbably funny - although it works because Jackson's honest-to-goodness black man is on hand to be consistently (and hilariously) offended by the impersonation, relieving audiences of the need to fill that role.

Here again, Stiller is on to something. In an age when self-reverence has made the Oscars all but unwatchable, Stiller pokes a sharp stick at Hollywood pomposity, with the precision of a guy who knows where to aim. *

Produced by Stuart Cornfeld, Ben Stiller, Eric McLeod, directed by Ben Stiller, written by Ben Stiller, Justin Theroux, music by Theodore Shapiro.