Monday, September 22, 2008

Tropic Thunder

There are various types of humour at work here, some sophisticated others pretty basic, so I guess enough kinds of people will find this movie utterly hilarious in enough patches to turn it into one of those runaway word-of-mouth successes.

The script for what is part movie spoof part Hollywood satire is the work of Ben Stiller, along with Ethan Cohn and Justin Theroux. I personally found the talkier parts of the movie funnier, but it also has to be said that some of the biggest laughs derive from gesture - such as the way Stiller unloads his gun into the jungle, or the manner that the pigmentally-adjusted Robert Downey JR complements his "Chicken George shit" with appropriately comical movements.

There has been some controversy surrounding some of the gags here, but as Senator Barack Obama should know by now, when you are at least partly targeting the lowest common-denominator, someone is bound to get offended when you start coming over all clever and ironic.

No comments: