Review of Tropic Thunder (2008) by Bill M — 10 Aug 2012

Tropic thunder is a big, very flawed comedy, it's never quite as consistently hilarious as you would hope and many gags fall flat, there are even whole stretches were it lacks any real gutbusting laughs, and theres the feeling that it kinda withdraws it's teeth from round the neck of it's targets as it goes along, but when Tropic Thunder is funny, when it just flat out works, it's brilliant, and at it's very best id say this still passes as one of the finest comedies of the noughties, it's huge and chaotic, freewheeling, insane and very inventive, and there is so much comedy gold to choose from, be it Robert Downey Jr's shocking, and controversial "blacking up" and genrally his incredible, imerssive creation of deranged method actor Kirk Lazarus, or Tom Cruise's amazing, gleefully foul mouthed and volcanic turn as fat, balding, overweight studio ex sect Less Grossman, stealing practicaly the whole film with his angry, ranting monstrousness (I WILL MASSACRE YOU!!!!) and an edgy feel of bad taste recklessness, satire of all things Hollywood, crazy abandon, plus Apocolypse now scale mad insanity, and you have, despite it's shortcomings, a potential classic, and an outright bad taste bomb.