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Dir. Ben Stiller
Rating: 6.7 | 0 User Reviews | Send to Friend
By James Viola
If war is hell then Hollywood is purgatory. From a few of the men who know a thing or two the politics of the fickle film industry comes a satire that illuminates the strange world of the pampered actor, the vainglorious director, and the ruthless movie executives running the show. It's familiar territory for Ben Stiller, who directs and stars in this Justin Theroux-penned comedy about a group of actors who, while filming what is being marketed as the next great war movie, are dropped into a hostile patch of Vietnamese jungle just for the sake of cinema verite. While the precarious situations that the oblivious but good-intentioned Tugg Speedman (Stiller) and his cast mates stumble into is undoubtedly funny, albeit in lowbrow sense, the film is at its strongest as a parody. There are humorous homages to Full Metal Jacket, Apocalypse Now and Platoon, and the dramatis personae is a shopping a list of showbiz stereotypes: the rap artist who thinks he can act, the action-movie star whose career needs a resurgence, the Oscar-winning method actor with neurotic tendencies, and so on. Anyone slightly familiar with the film knows that much of the humor involves Robert Downey Jr. wearing black face and speaking like a minstrel performer, but his role is a clever dig on the tremendous self-deception that serious methodologists go to for their theatrical truth. Ironically, Jack Black, whose Jeff Portnoy character is a cross between Chris Farley and Steve-o in the narcotics department, is mostly an annoyance. One would think that Black would take some pointers from Robert Downey Jr. on how to fiend for narcotics, but his performance is shrill and hollow. A hot dose of fireworks and action-sequences give the film a bit of an action sheen, but there's only so many times something can explode as the characters yell "Let's get the hell out of here” before the tension and humor dissolves under the weight of redundancy. Still, the cast is a fine assembly of talent, notably rounded out by Matthew McCaughnahey, Nick Nolte, Steve Coogan, which helps divert from a flimsy storyline that weakens as it strays deeper into the jungle of Vietnam. Tom Cruise even pays us a visit from the mothership in a memorable cameo as a bald, Jewish, obscenity-spewing movie executive. At the very least, the film manages to keeps its ambitions simple, even as it begins to wear out its welcome.
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