I don't have a movie review column, but I like to pretend that I do.

Ben Stiller: Tell them what happened here!

Robert Downey Jr: What did happen here?

Ben Stiller: ... I don't know.

That about sums up Tropic Thunder.

It is my custom to write reviews on any major motion picture, video game, or piece of literature that I am exposed to. I won't break with custom now. Monday evening, I spent some time with J & R, the key activities centering around hanging out and taking in this film.

The movie opens strong. Three pseudo-movie trailers play, each to provide context for our cast of all-star actors, who in this movie play a cast of all-star actors making a movie.

Robert Downey Jr. plays the role of a serious actor, the type who always turns up in these intensely controversial films. The fake movie ad, for a film called Satan's Alley, stars Robert playing a monk, who is sexually attracted to another monk, played by (cameo!) Toby Maguire. Sort of Religious Tension meets Brokeback Mountain.

Ben Stiller is essentially Sylvester Stallone playing John Rambo. His MO is apparently the action film genre, the kind that get rehashed over and over until they are completely run into the ground. The movie he showcases in his trailer is apparently the sixth installment in his line of shoot-em-ups. Run into the ground indeed.

Jack Black's comedy movie reminds us of Eddie Murphy in The Nutty Professor. Just like in those films, Jack plays about eight roles, male and female, all in the family, all horrifyingly overweight and loaded with gas. Essentially the type of movie that you wish in your bones would flop but somehow becomes a huge phenomenon based solely on ticket-sales to the low-brow-humor slice of the population.

This introduction to the cast is easily the strongest piece in the whole film, refreshingly entertaining and well done. It successfully preys upon our distaste for stereotypes and typical the typical movie trailer assembly. We joked that, had we seen it in the theatre, we wouldn't have been sure whether the promos had actually stopped or not.

Once this part is complete, though, everything goes wrong.

The plot of the movie is simple enough. They are trying to make a movie based on a book written about Vietnam, but a combination of inexperienced direction, incompatible casting, and the interference of a megalomanical movie producer played by Tom Cruise is making the matter difficult. So, the man who wrote the book--who has been on hand the entire time and is clearly so far around the bend he couldn't poke sanity with a long stick--suggests that they take the entire affair up into the Vietnamese upland and shoot a "real" film of what really went on. The director agrees, and up they go. The director steps on an old landmine within five minutes of landing and is disintegrated, leaving the cast to wonder whether that was just a special effect and he's hiding behind smoke and mirrors, or if he's really dead. In either case they're left to their own devices to figure things out, try to shoot the movie, and get through the plot. They are, to put it bluntly, lost.

Let me underline this: None of what I just described is in any way entertaining. The actors weren't just pretending to be lost. You can use that word to describe about every problem the movie has. The gags are lost in the hamfisted overabundance of vulgarity. No, I don't have delicate ears or anything. I haven no objection to profanity; I've used so much in my life that I have no moral high ground to snipe from. I mean what I say. In any given line about 40% of the words are a curse of some kind. Cramming that much into each sentence screwed up the syntax to the point that whatever joke was being told became scrambled and unfunny.

The plot points and twists are mixed up and in all the wrong places. The character development is confused and uninteresting. The timing is all wrong. The overall effect is that someone had read the sheet music but had never heard it played, metaphorically speaking.

On the other hand...

It's fairly clear early on that these actors weren't making this thing for any other reason than they wanted to. Watching Robert Downey Jr. nearly crack up trying to deliver some of his lines, or Tom Cruse goofy-dancing his way through the credits, is proof enough of that. It's plain that they had an absolute blast making it. It's almost as if they just wanted an excuse to go out, dress up, swear a lot, shoot blanks out of firearms, and blow stuff up. In this, they definitely succeeded. And I'll admit, I got a cheap laugh or two out of the whole thing.

Looking at it through that filter, I guess the movie was a success. The boys had fun making it and we got a few laughs out of it. Even if it flopped at the box office, which I have no idea whether it did or not, everybody involved was too rich to care.

So, glad you had fun, guys! We did, enough to justify spending the four bucks for the DVD rental anyway.