First Hit: There are some very very funny scenes in this film. There are some scenes that could be viewed as offensive.
Ben Stiller is playing Tugg Speedman a fading action star.
Robert Downey Jr. is playing Kirk Lazarus a well Oscared Australian actor. Jack Black is playing Jeff Portnoy who makes films about fat people farting. These guys are thrown together to make a Vietnam film based on a book by Nick Nolte playing a grizzled veteran named Four Leaf Tayback.
Their egos get in the way and after a ranting tirade by an egomaniac studio executive played by Tom Cruise, the director and Tayback decide to put the actors in the jungle and film them remotely. What wasn’t taken into account is that the actors run into a band of real freedom fighters that are using real bullets.
All the actors have some funny highlights and strong performances. However, the best of the lot are Cruise and Downey. Cruise plays his role as an over the studio executive all out and without fear. It is one of those performances (like in Magnolia) that, despite the bad press he gets, shows why Cruise can deliver something off the charts. Downey, on the other hand plays over the top in another way by being a white man who undergoes a special procedure to change his skin color to play a black man in this film. And as only Downey can do it, he gets into the role fully with lines like, “I don’t read the script, the script reads me”.
Overall: I wasn’t truly bowled over by the entire film although there were some extraordinarily funny scenes.