saw: tropic thunder
The trouble with lavishly overproduced satires about how expensive and not that good most Hollywood blockbusters are is that the takeoffs frequently end up being expensive and not that good themselves. And so it is with Ben Stiller's latest sendup. To his ongoing credit, he helms the comedy with visual wit and an eye for detail that few of his peers aspire to. To his discredit, he's essentially mounted a series of steroidal MTV Movie Awards sketches, episodic and discrete. The sense of compartmentalization extends to the performances, where every headliner is given his own carefully tended plot of scenery to chew over and over-chew. Even Tom Cruise's vaunted "loose, funny" prosthetics-reliant cameo as a studio honcho is essentially a meta prank banking on the audience's awareness that the star is in on the joke for a change, and not really that amusing on its own grating one-note terms. Ultimately Tropic Thunder ends up feeling as phony and self-indulgent as the industry it parodies. Its bark may be Dolby Digital Surround EX, but the bite is all veneers. Grade: C