Firing blanks

FILM Reviews

TROPIC THUNDER (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: BEN STILLER

STARRING: BEN STILLER, ROBERT DOWNEY JR, JACK BLACK, TOM CRUISE

THERE'S some crazed comedy brilliance at work in Tropic Thunder, Ben Stiller's much-hyped, pseudo-offensive comedy about a group of prima donna movie stars who find themselves caught up in a real war situation while making a combat epic called… well, you can probably guess. It's there every time Robert Downey Jr's Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus walks into frame, face blacked-up, frizz-wig on and voice growling like a grim parody of Howlin' Wolf. It's occasionally present when Stiller's fading action star Tugg Speedman makes a misguided bid for critical credibility by starring as a mentally challenged farm boy in a film called "Simple Jack" that is so spot-on, Sean Penn, Cuba Gooding Jr, Robin Williams, Sigourney Weaver, Harrison Ford and every other actor who has ever tried to follow Dustin Hoffman and Daniel Day Lewis's Oscar successes by "going retard" should feel their cheeks burning with shame. It's even occasionally present in the scary try-hard comedy-stylings of Tom Cruise, who channels his one genuinely great performance – Frank TJ Mackie in Magnolia – to play a chunky, bald-headed, profanity-spewing studio exec so ruthless he's willing to let his leading man be killed so he can collect on the insurance.

But when it comes to the overall film? Nope, sorry, brilliance doesn't come into it. It's intermittently funny, and certainly likeable, but it's also self-indulgent, out-of-date and a little bit gutless. Like the fictional cast of the fictional Tropic Thunder, too often the cast of the actual Tropic Thunder is armed for battle but firing blanks – comedy blanks, satirical blanks, character blanks.

A large part of the problem is that this has all been done before with more precision and certainly much more credibility. The Player, for instance, skewered the venal nature of Hollywood, Team America shredded its pomposity and HBO's Entourage regularly exposes the pampered nature of modern movie stars to hilarious effect. Even Stiller has sent himself up in merciless fashion before, turning himself into a shallow, trophy-chasing A-lister for Ricky Gervais on Extras. As a result, a lot of the insider Hollywood jokes in Tropic Thunder feel stale, something that isn't helped by the shaky foundations the very premise itself provides.

Set in the jungles of South-East Asia, Tropic Thunder revolves around the making of an epic, Apocalypse Now-style Vietnam War movie that is already millions over budget and months behind schedule just five days into production. The blame is attributed to the volatile nature of its principal cast, which in addition to Speedman and Lazarus, includes drug-guzzling, critically reviled comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) and soft-drink swilling rapper-turned-actor Alpa Chino (Brandon T Jackson). In an effort to get them to shape up and get the film back on track, Tropic Thunder's out-of-his-depth British director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) contrives to turn the big budget shoot into a guerrilla operation by dropping them into the jungle, surprising them with stunts and explosions and capturing their performances on mini-DV cameras hidden in the trees. Alas it's not long before they're confronting a very real enemy in the form of machine-gun-toting drug- runners who go by the name of Flaming Dragon.

This should have been the film's cue for relentless hilarity, but it's a sign of how little confidence Stiller has in this elaborate set-up that he quietly drops any suggestion that the characters – his in particular – are so desperate for the film to work that they're in denial about what's really happening to them.

Within a few scenes they've all come around to the notion that they're in serious trouble, which leaves the film with nowhere to go and nothing to do except offer one explosion-heavy set-piece after another to dwindling comedic effect.

The Vietnam setting is a bit of an albatross around its neck too. This might have been edgy material 20 years ago, after the Oscar success of Platoon and the box-office success of Rambo spawned a short-lived cottage industry of these kinds of pictures, but when was the last time Hollywood made a gut-spilling 'Nam flick? Setting it in Iraq or Afghanistan would have been a more daring proposition and much more pertinent to the way movie stars chase kudos by tackling supposedly important topics. Even satirising the making of one of those post-Saving Private Ryan Second World War slaughter-fests would have been funnier – at least those films continue to be made and continue to pick up Oscar nods.

Thank the Lord, then, for Robert Downey Jr. Delivering his second blockbuster-carrying performance of the year, the ghastly offence potential of his part was high, but Stiller and Downey have been smart about the character, contextualising it with layers of irony that should inure it to any charges of minstrelism. When we're told the blond-haired, blue-eyed Oscar-winner (he's part Russell Crowe with a dash of Mel Gibson) has had his skin pigment surgically darkened to play an African-American sergeant, the extremity of the process (although in truth it's not that extreme; Angelina Jolie had her skin darkened for A Mighty Heart after all) exposes both the hubristic nature of modern actors and the way Hollywood has a tendency to marginalise minorities rather than giving them major parts (something the film further underscores by having Jackson's character on hand to point out how crude and offensive Lazarus really is). This riff on method madness is as funny and as savage as comedy gets; it's also the lightning bolt that prevents Tropic Thunder being a complete washout.

THE WAVE (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: DENNIS GANSEL

STARRING: JÜRGEN VOGEL, FREDERICK LAU, MAX RIEMELT, JENNIFER ULRICH

FIGHT Club meets The OC might have been the pitch for The Wave had this film, about a disastrous high school project to explore the roots of fascism, retained the California setting of the true story that inspired it. Instead it is transposed to modern-day Germany, which makes it an altogether more provocative proposition. Jürgen Vogel plays a radical teacher assigned to teach a class on autocracy to a group of apathetic students as part of a special projects week in school.

Annoyed that he wasn't given the class on anarchy, he decides to test out a theory inspired by his pupils' belief that a situation like the Third Reich could never again happen in Germany. Instead of simply discussing the issues, he turns the project into a week-long experiment to see how quickly his kids will conform to fascist ways of thinking when given the opportunity to follow a charismatic leader (himself) and adhere to strict rules, dress codes and a core ideology in which everything is allegedly done for the greater good.

Structured in a way that reflects its title, writer/director Dennis Gansel pitches the film at a rapidly intensifying level of hysteria that isn't subtle, but certainly makes thematic sense.

LINHA DE PASSE (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: WALTER SALLES, DANIELA THOMAS

STARRING: SANDRA CORVELONI, VINICIUS DE OLIVEIRA, JOÃO BALDASSERINI

AFTER a forgettable foray into Hollywood with his redundant J-Horror remake Dark Water, Brazilian director Walter Salles gets back to his lyrical social-realist roots with Linha de Passe, a multi-character ensemble piece following the hardships and aspirations of four half-brothers and their pregnant mother in the dirt-poor neighbourhoods of Sao Paulo.

About to turn 18, aspiring footballer Dario is discovering time is running out for him to make it as a professional; born-again Dinho is struggling to reconcile a troubled past with his new devotion to God; lothario Denis is having to face up to the financial demands of fatherhood; and school-aged Reginaldo, who unlike his siblings is black, has become obsessed with riding buses in an effort to find the father he's never known. Trying to hold them all together is Clueza, about to give birth and trying to hold onto a cleaning job for a well-meaning doctor.

All of which makes Linha de Passe sound like a groan-worthy, chin-stroking affair, but as he did with his Che Guevara-biopic The Motorcycle Diaries, Salles, along with co-director Daniela Thomas, creates an absorbing story that is rich in human detail and generous in spirit without wallowing in the misery of his protagonists' hardships. It's about hopefulness, not hopelessness.

THE CHASER (18) ***

DIRECTED BY: HONG-JIN NA

STARRING: YUN-SEOK KIM , JUNG-WOO HA , YEONG-HIE SEO

A KILLER premise is doubtless the reason Leonardo DiCaprio snapped up the remake rights to this South Korean thriller. Dark and brooding, it's a cop film with a difference, in which the closest we get to a hero is Joong-ho (Yun-seok Kim), a disgraced detective-turned-pimp who suspects a rival lowlife of trafficking his girls after some of them go missing. In an effort to get to the bottom of their disappearance, he forces his last girl, sickly single mother Mi-jin (Yeong-hie Seo), to meet with the client he suspects of ripping him off. What he doesn't realise is said client, Young-min (Jung-woo Ha), is a serial killer.

Here's the kicker, though: he's caught almost immediately and confesses to a series of murders, but because neither the inept police nor Joong-ho can find any evidence, department bureaucracy dictates the cops can't hold him for more than 12 hours, forcing Joong-ho to embark on a frantic search for the now-missing Mi-jin before Young-min can walk free and finish her off. With the clock ticking, that should make for a tense thriller. Odd then that The Chaser drags its feet when it should be making us sweat with fear and anxiety. Still, it's well acted, refreshingly bleak and definitely worth a peek.

NEVER APOLOGISE (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: MIKE E KAPLAN

NEVER Apologise has an appropriate title if ever there was one, since this filmed record of Malcolm McDowell's two-hour on-stage tribute to his friend, mentor and collaborator Lindsay Anderson is at times an unapologetically indulgent affair.

Anderson, who died in 1994, was the Scottish-descended Brit maverick responsible for Richard Harris's finest hour in This Sporting Life and, more pertinently for this film, discovering McDowell and casting him in his Palme d'Or-winning, establishment-upsetting, 1968 masterpiece If… Going on to complete a loose trilogy of films together revolving around the main character from If… (O Lucky Man! and Britannia Hospital were the others) McDowell and Anderson forged a long-lasting and loving friendship, one that McDowell reveals here was complicated by the fact that Anderson, a celibate homosexual, was probably a little bit in love with him.

Poignant and moving insights such as this, together with some rare glimpses into the creative process, make up for the excessive luvvieness on display and while McDowell's anecdotes often go nowhere and his jokes tend to fall flat, he's surprisingly good company for the duration. But this is for devotees only and casual fans or anyone unaware of Anderson's incredible work is advised to start with his films.

THEN SHE FOUND ME (15) ***

DIRECTED BY: HELEN HUNT

STARRING: HELEN HUNT, COLIN FIRTH, BETTE MIDLER, MATTHEW BRODERICK

HELEN Hunt makes her writing-directing debut with this modest romantic comedy-drama about a desperate-for-a-baby primary school teacher (Hunt) who gets knocked up by her immature husband (Matthew Broderick) on the very day he decides to leave her. This just happens to be the same day that a potentially perfect new guy (played by Colin Firth) hits on her for the first time. Oh, and her adoptive mother dies also. And then her real mother makes contact. And… no, that's about it in terms of rapid-fire plot contrivance.

Surprisingly, none of this feels overly schematic, a credit to the way Hunt's straightforward directing style refuses to overplay the conventions of the genre: it has neither the quirky overtures of an indie film nor the shrill predictability of a studio-produced chick flick. It doesn't have much spark either, mind, but you can't always have everything.

Instead, like a lot of films directed by actors, it relies on its cast to deliver the minor pleasures that are on offer – which in this instance means Bette Midler as Hunt's occasionally deceitful birth mother and Firth, back on moody form as the divorced, devoted father who connects with Hunt in spite of himself.