Tropic Thunder
Directed by Ben Stiller

Tropic Thunder, the new comedy written and directed by and starring Ben Stiller, is so noisy, so busy, and so utterly filthy that it takes awhile for its satiric brilliance to assert itself. But assert itself it does; Tropic Thunder is the best send-up of the workings of show business since the original version of The Producers. In that great 1968 comedy, a crazed Zero Mostel decides to kill all the actors in the Broadway play he has produced.

"You can't kill actors!" says a horrified Gene Wilder in response. "They're not animals, they're human beings!"

"Oh, really?" responds Mostel. "Have you ever eaten with one?"

In Tropic Thunder, actors are again at risk of getting killed, not by a crazed Nazi this time but, rather, by a Laotian drug gang. Four of them are making a war movie, and in an effort to make the film more authentic, their director has flown them to a remote location in the jungle, has told them he's filming them from hidden cameras, and then has set them loose. Only one of them has bothered to read the script, and so, when they find themselves in the drug gang's crosshairs, they don't know they're in danger; they think it's all part of the movie they're making.

This is a terrific premise, and Stiller (who cowrote the screenplay with Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen) makes the most of it. There has rarely been a sight in recent years as amusing as the baffled

The farce is what makes Tropic Thunder a good movie. Its portrait of Hollywood--by far the most savage ever committed to film--is what makes Tropic Thunder so memorable. Most Hollywood satires have an odd politesse about them. They have good guys and bad guys, like all other Hollywood movies. They trash producers, but defend directors; attack directors, but spare writers; eviscerate agents, but make nice when it comes to the people who work behind the scenes. Tropic Thunder spares no one, and especially not actors. That is especially noteworthy, since it is his success as an actor that gave Stiller the power to make this movie.

Stiller is Tugg Speedman, once the cinema's reigning action star. When we encounter him, however, he has just come off two flops--the fifth sequel to his mammoth hit, Scorcher, and a disastrous effort to stretch himself by playing a mentally challenged adult in Simple Jack. His new Vietnam epic, called Tropic Thunder, is supposed to relaunch his career. But in the movie's first scene, he finds himself being out-acted by Kirk Lazarus, an insanely committed five-time Oscar winner who is an intentional amalgam of Russell Crowe and Daniel Day-Lewis.

Continuing with the comeback he began with his wonderful turn earlier this summer in Iron Man, Robert Downey Jr. gives a towering comic performance as Kirk, a 21st century Australian who has so submerged himself in his character that he has had his skin darkened chemically--and acts on and off screen as though he were a black man from Detroit circa 1965. Of course, what he actually knows about being a black man in Detroit in 1965 isn't all that much. He tries to claim racial solidarity with another costar, a disbelieving rapper named Alpa Chino (sound it out), by discussing the mutual scars they bear from 400 years of slavery and discrimination.