It seems like ages since I last went to the cinema and to be honest with you there does not seem to have been much on that I have wanted to see. However on Friday I decided to pop along to the cinema and ended up watching Tropic Thunder.

It is not very often that I will go to see a film and have absolutely no idea what the film is about and I had heard a little about Tropic Thunder, in fact a lot of what I had heard was about the complaints made by disability groups about certain themes in the film.

Ben Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey Jr. lead an ensemble cast in Tropic Thunder, an action comedy about a group of self-absorbed actors making a film of Vietnam veteran "Four Leaf" Tayback's (Nick Nolte) memoir Tropic Thunder. With fading action star Tugg Speedman (Stiller), Academy Award-winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), low-brow drug-addled comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) all behaving unreasonably during filming which results in the film being a month behind schedule after only five days and massively over budget.

Director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) is ordered by studio executive Les Grossman to get the production back on track or risk having it shut down, with some inspiration from Tayback, Cockburn drops the spoiled actors into the middle of the jungle, where he has installed hidden cameras and special effect explosions rigged so he can film "guerrilla-style". The actors without their assistants or mobile phones have only a map and a scene listing to guide them to the helicopter waiting at the end of the jungle.

Unknown to the actors, they were dropped in the middle of the Golden Triangle, the home of the heroin-producing Flaming Dragon gang, which believe the actors to be DEA agents. Tayback and pyrotechnics man Cody (Danny R. McBride) are captured by the drug producers and are soon joined by Speedman who believes it to be a POW camp from the script.
The gang soon realizes that he is the star of the box office bomb Simple Jack (this is what would have caused all the controversy) and force him to reenact the film several times a day.

Meanwhile, in Los Angeles, Speedman's agent, Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey), is trying to negotiate with an uninterested Grossman a previously laid out term on Speedman's contract that entitles him a TiVo on location when they are contacted by the Flaming Dragon gang and are asked for a ransom…
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I can't remember the last time I went to the cinema and heard the majority of the audience all laugh at the same points during a film. There were some good performances and a few cameos during the film I really don't understand why there was such a fuss over the film okay some people might have taken offense to the references made about retarded people and the whole "Simple Jack" character, I am also sure people could find fault with a white man (Robert Downey Jr.) playing an African American character.

In fact if people wanted they could find something to complain about in any film. This will be one film I will get on DVD and would suggest you go and see it if you have not already done so.

This entry was posted on Sunday, September 21st, 2008 at 6:06 pm and is filed under Movies. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.