The new redband trailer for Ben Stiller’s Vietnam war comedy “Tropic Thunder” is up and we’re pleased to see it’s a significant improvement from the all-audiences version (you can now see it below).
We’re not huge Ben Stiller fans (“Zoolander” is fun we suppose, but overrated, his turn in “Dodgeball” is certifiably heinous) or his comedy, but we loooove the idea of this film. We sometimes just wish someone different was behind it (Stiller wrote the script, stars and directed).
We’re also enamored by the concept of Robert Downey Jr. playing a celebrated Oscar-winning actor who takes his job so seriously he undergoes a controversial procedure to change the pigment of his skin so he can authentically play a black soldier in the film, but so far we’re not loving what we’ve seen. Even in this trailer his, “black accent,” is all wrong and we’re not sure what in blazes he’s aiming for.
That said, the trailer is definitely an improvement from what we’ve seen before, but we’re definitely in the minority here as most bloggers and writers are certainly onboard with this picture. We’re still not convinced, but this new trailer does make in-roads into changing our minds. Hopefully a youtube clip will be up later.
There are some laughs though including a pretty good diss at the expense of Eddie Murphy and his fat-suit proclivities. As you’ve probably read, ‘Thunder’ is about a group of actors shooting a big-budget war movie who are essentially forced to become the soldiers they are portraying when the loose-cannon director (Steve Coogan) sets the loose in the real jungles of South East Asia. We get to see moments of “Simple Jack” – the fake movie within the movie that Ben Stiller’s “action-hero” character Tug Speedman stars in (he plays a mentally-retarded farmhand, the critics revile it and the film is a huge bomb, RDJ referenced this weeks ago in an earlier profile), we witness a moment with Danny R. McBride (“Mother nature just pissed her pants suit!” he screams as he lets off huge explosions on set), and a pretty hysterical scene where an Asian kid that Ben Stiller thinks he’s adopted tries to stab him to death (“I was wrong!!!,” Stiller screams painfully as he’s running with the child on his back simultaneously stabbing him with all his repeated little might).
We’re still not sold yet, but maybe this thing is getting closer to what we hoped for.