Tropic Thunder VS. Pineapple Express

Sometimes films emerge from Hollywood in pairs. When one production company goes out on a limb with a certain type of movie, another will often fast track a comparable film to compete. So for every Bug’s Life there is an Antz and for every Volcano there is a Dante’s Peak (good luck picking a favorite from those last two…yikes).

While Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express have very different plots and settings, both are genre bending action comedies featuring unlikely heroes. Pineapple Express seeks to take a stoner film, Apa-tize it, and turn it into a buddy-action-comedy, while Tropic Thunder attempts to mix elements from war movies and comedies to end up with a lampoon on Hollywood and action movies that still works as a Hollywood action movie (in other words-Hot Fuzz for Americans). So of these two action-comedies, which is the most successful? Let’s take a quick look at each.

I have never smoked weed, so the beginning of this film felt a bit like one long pothead inside joke. It did not take too long for the laughs to stark trickling in for me once the plot got rolling, and after that the movie has its moments.

Part of Producer Judd Apatow's philosophy is to let the cameras roll in an attempt to foster natural improvisation. Having not seen another film in the Apatow lineup I can only say that with Pineapple Express, this strategy is employed with mixed results at best. They let the movie go places you normally would not expect, giving subplots to lesser characters that really have no structural point. Sometimes this works because it is so unexpected, but in others I found myself asking, “Why did we stay on that scene? What was the point of that extra ten seconds?” If the extra ten seconds had garnered a laugh from anyone maybe it would have been worth it, but it has the feel of kids who have just discovered the notion of moving pictures and think for some reason that because they are in front of a camera that every thing they do is funnier and that everyone everyone will be just as excited as they are to watch themselves…do nothing.

My main problem with the film is its tone and structure. It does not take long before you realize that the filmmakers could not decide on their point and just decided to make a funny movie. The problem with leaving things so unstructured is that you end up leaning on tried and true comic crutches:

#1 – Make kids, old grannies and tightwad upper middle class dads use the f-word repeatedly. Yeah, some people still think this is funny, but it is also lazy, and if you were to write good comedy, not only will you get the numbskulls laughing, but also the people with half a brain.

#2 – Be racist. In Pineapple Express they use Asians. They never specify the nationality, but the jokes are the same old fare: get the foreign guy to say the f word with a funny accent, get the foreign guy to talk about sucking a part of the male anatomy with a funny accent, get the foreign guy to say something unexpected in his own language and surprise people with the subtitles. Sound redundant? That's because it was old news even by the time Jackie Chan used the n-word in Rush Hour (but it was funnier then).

In addition to Rogen’s Dale Denton, you have James Franco playing Saul, the most loveable character in the movie, and Danny McBride as Red, who, in addition to his role in Tropic Thunder and the Foot Fist Way was hilarious in Hot Rod. He is a funny addition here and after driving his Daewoo into a henchman delivers the film’s best one-liner.

There are some funny moments: a fight between Dale, Saul and Red is probably one of the best scenes in the movie, and then there’s the car chase, which does not disappoint. Unfortunately, there is a movie around these two scenes, and the rest of it just did not connect for me. The problem with making a stoner film in which the characters remain stoners is that you rob your characters’ of development and thus alienate audiences that care for the characters in the movies they watch. Movies like Monty Python and the Holy Grail get away with this because they establish their tone as a spoof from the beginning. Pineapple Express spends too much time building concern for its characters and back-story and then leaves you hanging with a film that is peppered with funny moments, but no satisfying conclusions.

If I were to judge these films based on sheer laugh factor, then Tropic Thunder would win hands down. In the film’s opening minutes, they hit a pitch perfect parody of Hollywood marketing strategy that had me in tears, literally. I would find myself laughing throughout the movie just at the thought of some of the opening jokes.

As with Pineapple Express, though, Tropic Thunder has a difficult time establishing its tone: is this a war movie or a summer action movie; is it an intelligent social satire or an all out farce? It would probably be better to attend this movie expecting an all out lampoon, because you will not be as disappointed when you realize that many of the early digs at Hollywood and genre films are almost totally uprooted when the film basically embraces the same conventions it mocked at the beginning. It is apparent that they were going for a Hot Fuzz feel here, but Hot Fuzz was able to embrace a Hollywood-type action climax in a way that felt cohesive with the rest of the film. With Tropic Thunder, cohesion did not seem to be all that high a priority for the filmmakers, so if you go in knowing that, you will better enjoy the film and will be surprised at intermittent moments when it works as intelligent satire.

The cast is obviously having a blast in the movie, and they are very often a lot of fun to watch, but because they are “dudes playing dudes disguised as other dudes,” most of the time they feel a bit distant and unreal, and perhaps that’s what they are going for. Still it makes it hard to care when the action goes full-blown, and the film attempts to have it both ways, showing the characters’ change and growth, but still getting unbelievable action in at the same time.

Stiller, riffing off the Zoolander role, does triple duty as writer and director, and makes some choices that raised my eyebrows. A kid plays the main enemy, a choice that seems like it was made just because Stiller thought it would be random enough to elicit a laugh, but it didn’t. And then there is Tom Cruise appearing as a feared booty shaking movie exec…need I say more.

Downey in blackface has created no small stir, but as Manohla Dargis stated in her review of the film, it is not <i>his</i> black man that is the real blight on black culture, because that joke is really a dig at method actors. The real dig is the refusal to cast a black man in a role other than the Puffy-inspired hip-hop caricature played by Brandon Jackson. I guess the question on my mind is: when will Hollywood give blacks the chance to sink their teeth into the meatier roles like Downey’s?

Oh, and Jack Black is in the movie doing his take on a jonesing heroine addict going through withdrawals, but the joke is pretty one-note and on the nose. Like most Will Farrell movies it would almost be enough to carry a sketch, but a whole movie? No.

Rated R for pervasive language including sexual references, violent content and drug material.

Pineapple Express was at a disadvantage from the beginning since I am not a decriminalization fan or weed enthusiast, and because I do love movies and movie trivia, Tropic Thunder was definitely more up my alley. Nonetheless, I felt that both of movies had one thing in common: they were both a mess. They had potentially good ideas, but ran in too many directions and left all sorts of potential hanging in the air.

Ultimately, I think Tropic Thunder is the better film, if only to see the opening twenty minutes and Downey’s performance, but whichever film you choose, realize that you must wade through a lot of dead time to get the laughs and that there have been other movies that have succeeded far better at the intended goals than either of these.

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3.23 Copyright (C) 2007 Alain Georgette / Copyright (C) 2006 Frantisek Hliva. All rights reserved."