REVIEW: Tropic Thunder (15)

With comedy powerhouses Jack Black and Ben Stiller topping the bill, this year’s most anticipated comedy was sure to be a laugh riot. But against all odds, Robert Downey Jr is the one taking the front line of inducing pant wetting hilarity and making Tropic Thunder the funniest film of 2008.

Action movie star Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller) is beginning to wear a little thin on audiences as his Scorcher series reaches its tedious sixth instalment.

Following a failed attempt at Oscar glory by playing mentally-handicapped Simple Jack, Speedman goes back to his roots for true-life actioner Tropic Thunder.

After a troubled shoot lands the director (Steve Coogan) in hot water, the war veteran the film is based on (Nick Nolte) insists on dumping the cast in the depths of the jungle for guerrilla-style realism.

But when an unfortunate accident forces the cameras to stop rolling, Speedman obliviously follows the script and leads Academy award-winning actor Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr) and fart joke extraordinaire Jeff Portnoy (Black) into war with a real drug lord’s menacing army…

An inspired introduction to the three stars using trailers for their films sets the politically incorrect tone before the DreamWorks kid has even cast his rod.

Tropic Thunder’s marketing team really had their job done for them with this one; because if an image of Robert Downey Jr as a black Vietnam sergeant doesn’t pull in the crowds, God knows what will.

If there’s one performance movie fans are going to remember this summer it will undoubtedly be the late Heath Ledger’s unnerving take on The Joker in The Dark Knight.

That is, of course, if the former hell raiser’s hilarious send up of method actors (with Lazarus going so far as to undergo an operation to change the pigmentation of his skin to play Sgt Lincoln Osiris) doesn’t make them giggle all Batman related memories right out of their heads.

Despite taking an involuntary back seat to Downey Jr’s show-stealing performance as Kirk/Osiris (“I know who I am. I’m the dude, playing the dude, disguised as another dude!”) writer/director Ben Stiller’s efforts don’t go unnoticed.

But only until Tom Cruise rightly draws focus from everyone concerned and squarely onto his fat, balding, foul-mouthed producer (a character Stiller wanted to keep secret before paparazzi caught a snap onset) which blows his Golden Globe-winning turn as male lifestyle guru Frank T.J. Mackey in 1999’s Magnolia clean out of the water.

The Hollywood icon’s brief appearance is truly the gem of the film and makes up for the eyelid drooping Lions For Lambs (but doesn’t quite top the unintentionally side-splitting couch incident on The Oprah Winfrey Show in 2005).

Funny fans holding their breath for something to lighten the landscape of 2008 cinema can breathe a sigh of comic relief as the film provides enough farcical entertainment to see them through to 2009.

Perhaps a return to form for Will Ferrell in the upcoming Step Brothers could knock Tropic Thunder off the top spot as this year’s most humorous offering.

But with Downey Jr barging his way over from the Brat Pack to the Frat Pack, he may be given a run for his money.