What Do The Critics Say?

"Tropic Thunder is the biggest comedy of the year. It's also the funniest. It's attack humor at it's best." If you like it when Hollywood pokes fun at itself, then enjoy. Plus there are fake trailers and tons of cameos. The amount of effort Stiller puts into making fun of everyone, mainly actors, is great. There are cameos galore, fake movie trailers to start things out, and of course Downey Jr." Jeff Bayer THE SCORECARD REVIEW "Just when you think it's squeezed every last gasping belly laugh out of you, here comes another barrage of scathing hilarity. "Tropic Thunder" brings out the comic best in a number of other actors, too, among them Matthew McConaughey as Speedman's oily agent, and the wonderfully cracked Danny McBride as Cody, the movie's explosives expert. The movie's most uproarious performance is provided by Tom Cruise, playing a fantastically vile and abusive producer named Les Grossman." Kurt Loder MTV "It is often very funny, and wittily on-target about the fine madness of moviemaking." Stephen Whitty NEWARK STAR-LEDGER "A breathtakingly funny movie that weaves together huge gut-level laughs with some very subtle and layered satire about show business." Rob Thomas CAPITAL TIMES "I laughed loud and hard throughout this film, and I enjoyed every minute of it and have no problem enthusiastically recommending it to you." Devin Faraci CHUD "Lightening strikes twice in Tropic Thunder beginning with Robert Downey Jnr's audacious performance. Directed and co-written by he who made the Zoolander pout into an artform, it's funny at times, brazenly over the top, crude, rude, cynical, satirical, politically incorrect, topical, tropical, self indulgent, often tedious and almost explodes by its sense of its own brilliance." Louise Keller URBANCINEFILE

"The laughs fly as fast and furious as enemy fire. Humor is rough and raunchy and dripping with conceit as the actors mask their insecurities with the blustery bravado and macho posturing so emblematic of fleeting fame. Full frontal assault belongs to Stiller and company but the rear is brought up by some surprising comic talent." Jeanne Aufmuth PALO ALTO WEEKLY "Just when you think it's squeezed every last gasping belly laugh out of you, here comes another barrage of scathing hilarity. That they have pulled no punches in lampooning Hollywood's self-congratulatory treatment of race and disability: not to mention gay monks, wispy mysticism and celebrity adoptions of exotically tinged foreign babies, is a wonder" Kurt Loder MTV "In a nutshell: Tropic Thunder is snarfing, drool running down your chin, hurt-you-kind-of funny." Gary Wolcott TRI-CITY HERALD "The steady spray of jokes ricochets with machine-gun force, hitting dozens of worthy targets." Elizabeth Weitzman NEW YORK DAILY TIMES "Half showbiz satire, half action movie, half broad comedy and all Tom Cruise." Kyle Smith KYKLESMITHONLINE "Simple Jack is not a bone-headed pandering Hollywood idea of what a mentally handicapped person might be like, but a joke about how Hollywood often misses the point and underestimates its audience. It’s a smart and often very funny movie." Philip Martin ARKANSAS DEMOCRAT-GAZETTE "Tropic Thunder slashes at everything from heroin addicts to Vietnam Vets to bald, sweaty, overtly Jewish, foulmouthed Hollywood executives and does so with tongue so firmly and joyfully wedged in cheek, it would take a real sourpuss to be genuinely offended by it. There are some people it will offend. To them I say, go bask in some Happy Days reruns. To the rest of you: Go see it and delight in laughing until your sides split." Randy Shulman METRO WEEKLY WASHINGTON DC

The Inside Story "The inspiration for 'Tropic Thunder' goes back to 1987," says Director/Writer/Actor and Producer Ben Stiller. "I had a really small part in Steven Spielberg's "Empire of the Sun". At that time all my actor friends were doing Vietnam films like "Platoon" and "Hamburger Hill" and going off to fake boot camps for two weeks. Then during interviews they would say, 'This boot camp was the most intense thing I have ever experienced in my entire life and we really bonded as a unit and a group.' It was funny to me that actors were talking about this incredibly intense experience when in reality it was nothing like being a soldier and going to war. That sort of self-important, self-involved thing seemed funny to me; I just couldn't figure a way to make that into a movie." Stiller teamed up with fellow actor Justin Theroux ("American Psycho" & "Strangers with Candy") and began working out a first draft and outline for "Tropic Thunder". "We had a first act and an outline for a few years," says Theroux. "But getting the rest of the logic and story beats to work took a while. There were many, many drafts over the course of about five years." With Theroux living in New York and Stiller in Los Angeles, the two wrote scenes and e-mailed them back and forth. "Screenwriter Etan Cohen then joined in and it became a sort of free-for-all," Theroux revealed. "It was exactly what you would want a writing experience to be; a whole lot of laughing and a whole lot of fun. " The trio's work eventually evolved into a shooting script, "about an incredibly bloated, top-heavy Hollywood production with a bunch of actors who didn't do the work, didn't do the research, barely learned their lines, and who are more obsessed with how they're all going to come off in a war movie than with the subject matter," Theroux explained. "The director, of course, has no control over his actors, which makes him go bananas. So he and John 'Four Leaf' Tayback; who wrote a best-selling memoir called Tropic Thunder, hatch a plan to kidnap the cast, take them to the jungle, and shoot the film 'Blair Witch' style. No more chefs. No more assistants. No more masseuses. No more trailers. No more TiVo. They're just going to do it dirty, gritty, in the mud: the real deal, with real fear and real emotion." With that concept in mind, Stiller was adamant that the film not become a spoof. "The challenge was that it wasn't just an action movie and it wasn't a send-up," Stiller noted. "At the end of the day, you need to invest in the reality of the situation, and care about these people or it doesn't work. It was definitely influenced by a lot of real war movies, because I love that genre. I'm a real fan of those films. But it's also about Hollywood and how it works on an extreme level. As stretched as things get in this movie, there is still a basic level of reality." "Ben has a tremendous gift for movie making," Stiller's producing partner Stuart Cornfeld ("The Fly I & II" and "Starsky & Hutch") observes . "In order to write something you really have to envision it, and then once you've envisioned it, directing is about delivering on that vision. Ben saw the film very clearly along these specific lines, knew exactly what he wanted to do and how much more there was to the movie than what was just printed on the page." "Ben has made so many great movies, and now he's also writing and directing. But this is the biggest movie he's ever directed," Jack Black ("The School of Rock" & "King Kong") notes. "It's got huge, epic shots with helicopters coming through the mist and dodging mountains, machine gun fire, major explosions, tons of extras. Then he's got to make it funny. And he does. He's a pro, totally knows what he wants to do, and it was great working with him." DreamWorks and Red Hour Films, (Stiller and Cornfeld's production company), brought in producer Eric McLeod, who had recently served as executive producer on the back-to-back productions of "Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest" and "Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End." The team knew McLeod would be up for the challenge of shooting a film largely on location. "This was bigger than any movie I've ever been involved with in terms of scale," says Cornfeld. "Eric had experience mounting major productions and was well-versed with working in exotic locations and with state governments and handling major set construction and explosions without harming the existing environment. He was the key to working out the logistics of this production." We initially considered shooting in Southern California to double for Vietnam and Burma/Myanmar in Southeast Asia's Golden Triangle," McLeod ("Mr & Mrs Smith" and "The Dukes of Hazzard") explained. "But all of us wanted a unique, lush, and different look to this film, and that's what Kauai offered." A frequent destination for movie and television crews, the thirty two mile wide island of Kauai has been utilized over the years for such notable films as "South Pacific" and the Costa Rica game preserve in Steven Spielberg's "Jurassic Park." It is also part of the Four Wheel drive experience offered by Hawaii Movie Tours. Production designer Jeff Mann ("Gone in Sixty Seconds" & "Mr & Mrs Smith") recalls that early in pre-production he and Stiller spent up to twenty five hours over the course of six to eight weeks in a helicopter flying over the island looking for film locations, primarily the Hot LZ ("landing zone") and the Flaming Dragon compound. "We were looking for mountain ranges and environments that didn't feel recognizably Hawaiian, without the red earth and vertical ridges of the Na Pali Coast," Mann says. "We needed to discover someplace that felt more like the Golden Triangle." McLeod compares the film's massive six month pre-production process to "adult adventure camp." He recalls, "As most of the movie was shot on Kauai, we scouted by helicopter, by boat, by ATV. We wanted unique locations, places that hadn't been shot before. That required more work on our end, but in the end we found everything we needed and it was well worth the work." Starting with the first day of filming, Stiller led the cast and crew in filming a major battle scene for the fictional epic war film. Reminiscent of memorable war scenes in films from "Apocalypse Now" to "Saving Private Ryan," this is where we first meet the heroes of the film within a film. "We had to deal with a lot of rain and a lot of mud," Black said with a laugh. "But the locations looked great and they really added to our scenes. When you arrived on set, you kind of knew you weren't making a typical comedy or a typical action film, and I think when people see the film they'll understand why Ben picked those locations." One location, Mount Waialeale, where the Flaming Dragon Compound was built, is noted for having 350 rainy days per year averaging 450 inches (11,430 mm) of rainfall annually: more rain than any other place in the world. The filmmakers brought in construction crews from Oahu and Los Angeles to widen the road for film production trucks, trailers and the other equipment needed to support the cast, crew and hundreds of technicians. Sets were then built, including a working hundred-foot wooden bridge leading into the compound. "The whole thing took a little over three months," says Stiller. "When we first went out there to rehearse I realized what a drive it was," says two time Golden Globe winner Robert Downey Jnr ("Ally McBeal" & "Short Cuts"). "Anyone can attest to the fact that it was just insane. It didn't seem like there was any good reason why we should be shooting here. It was so tough and so knee-deep in mud and rain, but we were blessed because there wasn't a day that we didn't enjoy, which is so rare. Oftentimes when you go into those situations or locations you think it's going to be hell, but this was a very enjoyable purgatory for a month or two." One cast member who didn't complain about the rain and mother was Bertha, the Water Buffalo who plays a part in the film. The filmmakers found Bertha in Texas and flew her to Kauai on a special plane. But about midway through filming, everyone was in for a big surprise. Her trainer rang to tell them she wasn't coming to work as she had just given birth to a calf. "We didn't know she was pregnant. No one knew she was pregnant," McLeod recalls. "Bertha having this baby was definitely kind of a humorous morale booster for everyone." In honor of Jack Black, the animal trainer named Bertha's baby "Little Jack." Cinemagoers will be taken in by the opening war scene and it's realism. Comedy is familiar territory for Stiller and Theroux, but the action elements were another matter, so the writing team consulted with famed military advisor Dale Dye to make sure the military action and jargon depicted in the film's war sequences were accurate. Dye (who played General Perry in "Rules Of Engagement" and General Kreuger in "The Great Raid") and and his company, Warriors Inc., have lent their talents to dozens of films and television projects over the years, from "Band of Brothers" to "Saving Private Ryan," and Stiller attributes their insight to making the first part of the story so strong and credible. To continue that authenticity throughout production, Warrior Inc.'s advisors Mark Ebenhoch and Mike Stokey were on set as technical advisors for the first few weeks of filming the Vietnam battle sequences. "Ben had a mandate that the film's opening scene be as real as possible, as if the actors had been through actual boot camp," says Ebenhoch, a retired Marine gunnery sergeant. "We worked to get the actors up to speed with weapons handling, tactical moving: basically giving them the look of realistic soldiers." Ebenhoch recalls his biggest surprise was how adeptly Jack Black took to working with the weapons. "Jack had to fire an M60 machine gun and took to it like a baby takes to milk. He became very proficient with the weapon, which holds several hundred rounds." "We trained with some very powerful artillery," Black says of his brief training. "And somehow I got stuck with the heaviest gun, an M60; they call it a 'pig.' People were saying that I was a natural, though it's disturbing to think that I could be such an effective, steady killing machine." "Ben wanted to make everything the best it could be, and he was one of the hardest working guys on set," McLeod notes. "He wanted everyone to understand that this was not only a comedy, but an action film as well. He didn't want to compromise. Ben made everything important, and when you watch the film you'll see how the littlest details ended up being important for the film." The end result that "Tropic Thunder" is a very funny, very realistic film filled with outstanding performances, excellent SFX and some surprising cameo's from very well known faces. Synopsis

Ballooning costs and the out of control egos of the pampered cast are threatening to shut down the production of "Tropic Thunder", a film based on the adventures of war hero Four Leaf Tayback. The final straw comes when the films two stars, five times Academy Award winning Australian actor Kirk Lazarus and Tugg Speedman, fighting over a scenes emotional content, cost the film company 4 million dollars and the once only opportunity to film a spectacular scene involving two fighter jets on a bombing raid. Les Grossman, the man who has financially backed the film is really pissed and it's the film's director, Damien Cockburn who is in the firing line. Four Leaf convinces the frustrated director there's only one way to save the film: drop the pampered stars into an area of the jungle where he's rigged up hidden cameras and film a real action movie. What the two are unaware of is, that this area in South East Asia is part of the heroin triangle and that their presence has already been detected.

The Verdict "And you thought "Southpark" was outrageous! Well, "Tropic Thunder" makes "Southpark" look like a bedtime story. But don't let that stop you from taking in what is truly the funniest film of 2008 and one which will have you rolling in the aisle, clutching your stomach as tears roll down your cheeks. Yes, this really is 'piss your pants' and 'laugh your tits off' humour. The cast is superb. Stiller has a hand in everything. He carried the mantle of director, co-writer, producer and the lead role as the fast fading movie star, Tugg Speedman. There are so many highlights it would be a shame to spoil it for you but there are noteable performances from Robert Downey Jnr as the geneticaly modified Australian super star Kirk Lazarus; Jack Black as substance abuser Jeff Portnoy; "Pineapple Express" star Danny McBride as the productions pyrotechnic creator and Matthew McConaughey playing a 'typical' Hollywood agent. Then there's the huge trailer send-ups that preceed the films heartbreaking opening scenes and yes, there are cameo appearances, including one absolute bottler from an unexpected quarter. Is it everyones cup of tea. I don't think so. But the good news is that there's enough star power in the cast to ensure "Tropic Thunder" attracts a huge audience. You'll either die laughing or you'll sit there stunned. I suspect most will find "Tropic Thunder" really enjoyable. Soundtrack out on the Warner Music label. Highly Recommended. 4 1/2 STARS." Crew Bytes "TROPIC THUNDER" was .......
directed by Ben Stiller ["Zoolander"]; set decoration by Daniel B Clancy ["The Amityville Horror", "The Number 23" and "1408"]; costume design by Marlene Stewart ["True Lies", "The X-Files", "21 Grams" and "Stop-Loss"]; production design by Jeff Mann ["Swordfish", "Terminator 3" and "Transformers"]; edited by Greg Hayden ["Meet the Parents", "Zoolander" and "Austin Powers in Goldmember"]; director of photography Two Time Academy Award winner John Toll ["Legends Of The Fall", "Braveheart", "Captain Corelli's Mandolin", "The Last Samurai" and "Gone Baby Gone"]; original music by Theodore Shapiro ["Along Came Polly", "Dodgeball: A True Underdog Story", "Fun with Dick and Jane" and "Semi-Pro"]. Who's Who?

Ben Stiller Robert Downey Jr Jack Black Anthony Ruivivar Jay Baruchel Nick Nolte Danny McBride Steve Coogan Tom Cruise Matthew McConaughey Mike Hoagland Valerie Azlynn Brandon T Jackson Darryl Farmer Rod Tate Reggie Lee Trieu Tran Brandon Soo Hoo J. Thomas Chon Jacob Chon Eric Winzenried

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Tugg Speedman Kirk Lazarus Jeff Portnoy Platoon Sergeant Kevin Sandusky Four Leaf Tayback Cody Damien Cockburn Les Grossman Rick Peck MiGrossman's Assistant Damien's Assistant Alpa Chino Alpa's Posse Alpa's Posse Byong Tru Tran Half Squat Half Squat Chopper Pilot

Run Time 107 minutes Rated MA15+ [AUST] Copyright ©2008 - Paramount Pictures - All Rights Reserved ©2008 All Rights Reserved The Movie Pages - Protected by Australian, International, Copyright & Trademark Laws.