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That sound you can hear, the muted whine of air slowly being released out of a broken trumpet, is the sound of disappointment. Crushing disappointment. A few months back, in the magazine, we ran a preview of Tropic Thunder in which we expressed hopes that Ben Stiller’s spoof would be comedy gold. Sadly, it falls far short of that mark – it doesn’t even win comedy bronze. The film already has a reputation for laying into Hollywood with all guns blazing. It’s just a shame that those guns are peashooters.

Yes, the fake trailers accompanying the film are great. Robert Downey, Jnr. grabs the biggest belly laughs, much like the rest of the film. His portrayal of Kirk Lazarus, a ludicrous Australian method actor (cough Russell cough Crowe) is spot on, and the fake film that made his name, a tale of the forbidden love between two monks, will make you spit popcorn kernels from giggling.

Yes, the premise is brilliant: hoping to bag themselves some golden gongs, a crack team of preening actors sign up for an oh so worthy war movie only to inadvertently wander into an actual war zone. The joke being that these pompous prima donnas still think they’re on a set: whenever an unfortunate director steps on a landmine, they applaud the pyrotechnic staff for staging a very convincing explosion.

But here’s the rub. The rest of Tropic Thunder just isn’t funny. Which is a pretty fundamental error for a comedy. As with American foreign policy, it’s the same joke retold many, many times. I realise that the likes of Platoon had lots and lots of swearing, but Stiller seems so enamoured with five men cussing and profaning in the jungle that he forgot to write any actual gags. And the few gags there are miss the target by about six thousand clicks. Just because your humour is stupid doesn’t mean that your audience is too: if you’re going to make one of your main characters dress like Rambo, why does somebody need to point out, “You look just like Rambo”? If you’re going to constantly make reference to famous Australians, surely there have been more than Crocodile Dundee and Kangaroo Jack.

But here’s the major contention: Stiller’s Simple Jack, a parody of Forrest Gump and any other film in which actors “go retard” (the film’s phrase, not mine) to win an Oscar. Excuse me while I mount my moral high-horse, but Stiller is deluded if he thinks that some people won’t have a problem with his buck-toothed, stuttering, slabbering farmhand. He recently said that if they do then they’re missing the point: he’s making fun of Hollywood do-gooders, not the disabled. This is about as true as claiming that sticking your tongue down your bottom lip, tapping the back of your hand and saying “Joey” in a silly voice is just a bit of childish fun. Not wishing just to offend one minority alone, Tropic Thunder leads us to believe that the entire Vietnamese race consists of drug-trafficking, America-hating terrorists who lap up a bit of the old poking-fun-at-those-with-learning-difficulties. They capture Stiller and goad him (like all Vietnamese, they just happen to have torture equipment to hand) into the Simple Jack routine yet again, in case we missed it the first 16 times.

No matter what Stiller thinks or how he tries to spin it, making fun of the afflicted isn’t cool. Especially when it’s not the first time he’s done it – remember There’s Something About Mary? It’s veering into a vile, spiteful world inhabited by the likes of Bernard Manning and Jim Davidson, and is meant for the same people who think that an incontinent old lady on Little Britain is hilarious.

It sets the tone for the film as a whole. Tropic Thunder passes itself off as satire but it mostly comes across as snide. It’s supposedly holding up a diamante-encrusted mirror to the botoxed face of Hollywood, but Stiller and Jack Black are just as guilty of self-indulgence. Black, so likeable elsewhere, gurns in a one note performance, badly played. He does little but fart and moon and whinge about what and who he wouldn’t do for a heroin wrap. Stiller, however, reprises the same well-worn dumbbell schtick from Zoolander and Dodgeball and hopes nobody notices the difference. If there’s anyone guilty of believing his own hype, it is he.

And that leaves Robert Downey, Jnr., making believe he’s a badass, jive talkin’ black dude in a film within a film, neither of which is much cop. He’s the best thing about Tropic Thunder, but he’s given short shrift by a crap script which requires him to jibber jabber like Mr. T. It’s not racist, of course. It’s irony, don’t you know.

All in all, this proves to be a disheartening, depressing experience. It says a lot that the highlight of proceedings is a baldy, beardy Tom Cruise dropping the F-bomb and air humping to gangsta rap. Tropic Thunder is a mostly boring, frequently fascistic, nasty-minded movie whose main message is that Hollywood isn’t a very nice place – and we knew that already. Ross Thompson

Posted on: September 30, 2008