IF THE New Yorker's Obama cover had folks fired up, Robert Downey Jr.'s turn in "Tropic Thunder" might cause actual spontaneous combustion.
Downey plays a vainglorious, Oscar-endowed method actor so determined to get under the skin of his latest character, a black man, he has his pigment medically ebonized. Kind of a reverse Michael Jackson.
He also sports an Afro wig and Walt Frazier sideburns suited to his character's biography - platoon leader in the Vietnam War.
This is a war not known for generating movie comedies, and maybe that's why "Tropic Thunder's" opening scene is so disconcerting - one soldier tending to another as a jet of blood spurts from his head. The volume of blood is meant to be farcical, but even as a joke it feels tactless, and you wonder how it could possibly be softened by context.
Writer-director Ben Stiller eventually pulls back to show us what he's up to. It's a big-budget movie set, full of overpaid and generally bad actors doing an appalling job of bringing substance to material beyond their grasp and ability.
Everything is going wrong - the spurting blood, the "controlled" explosions, and the director (Steve Coogan) has lost control of his all-star cast. Downey's decorated method actor is openly disgusted with his co-stars - an overmatched action star (Stiller), a fart-movie comedian (Jack Black) and a rap performer whose stage name is Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson). What's more, an angry studio exec (a showy Tom Cruise with fat padding and a fake bald spot) is threatening to pull the plug.
The desperate director decides to abandon the big-budget approach and go guerilla, taking his pampered cast and a few hand-held cameras into the jungle, where they encounter (oops) real narco guerillas - whom the clueless actors initially mistake as extras.
"Tropic Thunder" plays this situation for slapstick laughs, and gets a few. The bigger laughs, though, come from Stiller's more ambitious ideas - an acid satire of moviemaking hubris, especially where it intersects with biography/history.
Stiller has said the idea for "Tropic Thunder" has been germinating since the '80s, when as a young actor he had to listen to colleagues talk about the life-altering experience of attending combat boot camp.
Stiller attacks the self-serving insularity of this attitude, and comes close in "Tropic Thunder" to suggesting that any attempt to make a movie about war is morally obscene (the apparent meaning of that opening sequence).
