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Film Review: ‘Tropic Thunder,’ 4 stars

It’s an immutable law of Hollywood that each summer season ends up being defined in large part by one particular silly-funny comedy classic.

This year, for about a week, “Step-Brothers” looked like it could be that film. Then the next week, “Pineapple Express” wafted in and claimed squatter’s rights.

Now, just one week later, it’s over: “Tropic Thunder,” a gloriously deranged parody of overblown war movies and their overblown stars, will go down in the books as the undisputed silly-funny champion of Summer ’08.

Ben Stiller, who directed and co-wrote the script with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, swiftly unfurls the welcome mat in a pre-opening-credit blitz of one faux ad and three faux movie trailers.

First up is Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino (say it slowly), a rapper turned entrepreneur turned actor, hawking his new energy drink, “Booty Sweat.”

Next up is Stiller himself as rapidly fading action megastar Tugg Speedman, who hit it big with the global-catastrophe flick “Scorcher,” but watched his stock plummet like Enron by the time “Scorcher VI” (“Here we go again … again!”) limped into theaters.

Jack Black is Jeff Portnoy, drug-addled star of “The Fatties,” a concept based entirely on the sounds and smells of flatulence. (“Letting loose this summer!”)

And Robert Downey Jr. is five-time Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus, an intense Aussie known for taking Method acting to the far side of the universe, fresh off his turn as a monk who dares to taste forbidden fruit in “Satan’s Alley” (co-star: “MTV Best Kiss award winner Tobey Maguire”).

This unlikely quartet is in Southeast Asia filming “Tropic Thunder,” a screen adaptation of a supposedly true book written by former POW “Four-Leaf” Tayback (grizzled Nick Nolte) about how his fearless squadmates rescued him from the Viet Cong.

It’s not going well. Director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) has lost control of his egomaniac stars, F/X supervisor Cody (Danny McBride) is detonating costly pyrotechnics at the wrong times, and studio boss Les Grossman (Tom Cruise, in thick glasses, bald wig and fat padding) is calling in demanding to know why the shoot is a month behind schedule — after only five days of filming.

The desperate Cockburn decides to take his four stars, along with Cody, Four-Leaf and the actor playing the requisite FNG (Jay Baruchel), deep into the bush, far from their plush hotel, so they can get back to basics. But almost immediately, Cockburn steps on an old French land mine and blows himself to bits (setting up one of the film’s most outrageous sight gags).

At first, the boys think this is a special effect rigged as part of the new motivational plan. But when they’re accosted by indigenous druglords carrying real ammo, as opposed to their blanks, and Cody, Four-Leaf and later, Tugg, are taken captive, it dawns that real life has supplanted their Hollywood fantasy — and that to survive, they must summon their inner Rambos most ricky-tick.

As the jungle adventure unfolds, the story periodically cuts to the home front, where Grossman and Tugg’s smarmy agent (Matthew McConaughey) try to figure out what’s going on.

The entire cast is golden. No one plays clueless vanity better than Stiller (see “Zoolander”), and Downey is superb as an actor so into realism in his work that he had his skin darkened to play a black grunt (a risky gambit that works brilliantly within the film’s context).

That’s not even the most un-PC touch — that would have to be the scene in which Tugg and Kirk ruminate on the nuances of playing mentally challenged characters, as Tugg did in his legendary box-office bomb, “Simple Jack,” the tale of a bucktoothed hayseed who could talk to his farm animals.

The most sublime delight here may just be Cruise. As the profane Grossman, he hasn’t been this loose and funny since ... uh, actually, the Tominator has never been this loose and funny. Ever.

Do the boys make it home alive? Well, let’s just say that the story ends on Oscar night with honors being bestowed on a certain documentary billed as “the true story behind the most expensive fake true war story ever.”

In the end, the most intriguing thing about “Tropic Thunder” is that amid the wild sight gags, rat-a-tat dialogue and purposely gratuitous grossouts, Stiller and Co. use our boundless infatuation with the movies to deftly tap into themes of ego and identity, what’s real and what’s not, what matters and what doesn’t.

A nut-fest like this, a message movie? Now that’s some kind of comedic genius.

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Rated R for over-the-top violence, language and drug references. Got a rant or rave about the movies? E-mail cvinch@atpco.com

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