Tropic Thunder is one of those movies that is better than it has any right to be. The trailers don’t do it justice. The cast nails their performances (Robert Downey Jr. is outrageous) and the script is funny. While overall the movie is predictable, it manages to throw in a handful of surprises that make those scenes all the funnier. Even the scenes that are predictable leave you laughing by performances that elevate the material far beyond the words on the page. While it definitely deserves its R rating for crude language, if you feel like laughing this is a movie not to miss.
My wife and I saw this and weren’t expecting much. We were utterly surprised and laughed till we got sick. What got me was that there were several levels of parody involved, some of which were pretty subtle.
Of course, the Simple Jack stuff was just damn hilarious. Simple Jack chasing the butterflies with the hammer nearly gave me a hernia.