I have a number of complaints about this film and hardly any praise. The broadest complaint I cast at this production is that it is simply not funny. The jokes are heavy handed and buried in self-referential smugness and/or so blatantly intended to be edgy they come off as sophomoric pranks. The film follows a group of self involved actors and a director into the depths of a Vietnamese jungle as they attempt to shoot an improvised war film. When the director is killed by a landmine the actors are left to fend for themselves. Still thinking the film is loaded with special effects and extras, the actors are in reality attacked by drug runners. Essentially, this is The Three Amigos without the plotting.

The biggest problem with the film is sloppiness. It is just messy. The scenes trail on for too long and stumble over obvious attempts at industry in-jokes. When they're not busy with their self-mockery the cast doesn't have anything to do. Their characters are very flat so when it comes time to pull on their conflicts to create comedy the results are hobbled by a lack of depth. This pushes the cast (Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Junior, Jack Black, Steve Coogan, and Jay Baruchel) to improvise, a task they are clearly not up to completing. With the exception of Robert Downey, everyone fumbles about like their stuck in the trailing moments of a poorly executed Saturday Night Live skit. They appear to be sticking to humorless vein attempting to find something to deliver and coming up dry. Downey only succeeds to be interesting because of his portrayal of an white Australian pretending to be an African American. This isn't funny but it gives him something to play off of. An example of this fumbling is seen directly following the death of the film's director when he steps on a landmine. His body is decimated by the explosion. In the scene action-movie star Tugg Speedman (Stiller) is convinced that the horrible death he's just witnessed is fake. He locates the director's decapitated head and holds it up for the other actors to see. He proclaims that its all movie magic. He then reaches into the shredded neck of the dead man's head and licks the blood from his fingers. To push things further, Stiller then pulls out the guts from the neck and head while claiming it is a fake head. To push things even further he puts the dead man's head on the butt of his gun. This is all intended to be funny. The whole movie is like this scene. No creativity, no genuine humor, just a bunch of careless elites trying to be edgy and over-the-top.

Beyond the lack of humor and the abundance of clumsy crassness, there are some other very serious issues that need to be addressed. When the film was released there was an outcry from advocacy groups for the intellectually impaired. I wrote about the controversy here. Having worked with the mentally retarded for years, knowing the families of mentally challenged people and seeing the effects of people's bigotry against the handicapped, I take the subject rather seriously. The film hit controversy because of a slew of jokes surrounding one of Tugg Speedman's films called Simple Jack. In this fake film, we see the trailer in the movie, Speedman plays Jack a mentally retarded man who can speak with animals. Stiller is shown in the role chasing a butterfly with a hammer, and generally overplaying the retarded man role. I actually didn't take too much offense at this. It was meant to be offensive and meant to mock how Hollywood handles the mentally retarded. At one point they have Downey and Stiller talk about how actors don't go "full-retard" for roles, meaning they play a mentally challenged person but that person always has a special ability (Forrest Gump was a great runner, Rain Man was a genius at counting, etc.) This is very true. Where the film crosses the line, at least to me, is with Speedman's agent Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey.) Directly following a conversation focused directly on Simple Jack, right after we see the trailer, Peck is reminded that Speedman is attempting to adopt a child. Peck then grumbles that Speedman is lucky because "At least you get to choose yours. I'm stuck with mine." They then insert a picture of Peck and his son (below.)
The son is clearly shown as being mentally deficient in some capacity. In light of the discussion that directly preceded this shot the implication is heavy that the child is mentally challenged. In an age where people righteously proclaim that it is moral to abort mentally retarded children (Google Trig Palin and marvel at things you find) it is unbelievable to me they would stoop so low as to show a mentally challenged person and push the notion they are a terrible burden. I know families of the intellectually disabled, they love their family member as any other. People with disabilities are brutally treated still in this society and have been treated as less than human throughout our collective histories. This mockery is the lowest kind of humor people can get involved in. To push it further, the film ends with a shot of Peck and his son on a private jet. The son, bib around his neck stares blankly out the window (below.)


In post-production, the controversy was heating up. In the final credits they show the characters, freeze-frame on them and insert a graphic around their image. In the case of the son, they surround him with video-game aliens. In my opinion, this was done to suggest that the kid was simply mind-numbed from too much media. This was never acknowledged in the film, something they would have mentioned since it could have been used to play up some jokes. I believe they did this to try to remove the concept the boy was mentally retarded. Of course, most viewers won't make this connection and still walk away having laughed at a boy for being handicapped.

If this weren't enough, Stiller also mocks the memorable image from Oliver Stone's film Platoon. The image where Sgt. Elias is shot and as he dies thrusts his arms up to the sky in a Christ-like motion. This mockery is done a couple of times. Throughout the film, Stiller and company attempt to make fun of war film imagery and theatrics. The problem I have here is the root of that image. Stone pulled that image very carefully from a real event and used it in his film as a memorial. The original image comes from a 1968 photograph by Art Greenspon of a paratrooper of A Company, 101st Airborne assisting wounded and dying men. Perhaps I am being overly sensitive, but the mockery of real events such as this are disrespectful. You can say, well he's really mocking Stone's use of the image besides, no one is getting hurt. I understand that there are different ways to take the use of the image. I argue that it is bad taste and disrespectful.

Ultimately, this film is little more that a gaggle of careless people who have grown up in privilege (mostly) who devised a little piece of meta-fiction to mock the frivolity that surrounds them. In doing this however they also reveal an incredible disconnect with any sense of responsible behavior or decorum. I get they were trying to push the envelope, but we need to have standards. A society without standards is one that cannot stand for long. These men are the heirs of greater talents both in a familial sense and cinematic ally. Our culture has been handed over to reckless men who care little about the results of their actions and care even less to putting in the creative energy to deliver worthwhile product. I strongly advise skipping this film. It is not funny and even if someone is completely lacking moral judgment, offensive for no reason whatsoever beyond just to be offensive. Don't you have better things to do than to watch something like this?


Related Reviews:
Ben Stiller movies
Zero Effect (1998)
Zoolander (2001)


Other Critic’s Reviews:
Roger Ebert
Need Coffee

Labels: Ben Stiller, film, Jack Black, movie review, Nick Nolte, Robert Downey Jr, Steve Coogan