Tropic Thunder is star/co-writer/director Ben Stiller's big middle finger to the critics who have noted that his career trajectory has turned pretty lame since he started doing family-friendly, lowest-common-denominator fare like Meet the Fockers and Night at the Museum. Sure, they made Ben billions, but where was the daring performer from The Ben Stiller Show, There's Something About Mary, or even the reckless dude who made The Cable Guy? He's back in Tropic Thunder, the most daringly un-PC, in-your-face film that Hollywood has produced since Team America: World Police and a solid third hit in the trifecta of R-rated comedies of late summer 2008, which started with the pretty good Step Brothers, moved on to the great Pineapple Express, and ends somewhere in between with Tropic Thunder.

Thunder opens with some of its most inspired satire, a series of three previews that only a heartless critic would spoil, other than to say that they perfectly and hilariously set up the personas of the stars of the movie within a movie - egotistical action hero Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), Australian method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.), and physical comedian Jack Portnoy (Jack Black). Tugg is the money-man behind the film within a film, an adaptation of the legendary Four Leaf Tayback's (Nick Nolte) biographical novel about his time in Vietnam. But Tugg isn't the only prima donna on the set. To take on the most challenging role of his award-winning career, Lazarus has controversially dyed his own skin black and, well, Portnoy just happens to be a drug addict. Along with newcomer Kevin Sandusky (the always-underrated Jay Baruchel) and rapper-turned-actor Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), the three stars are set to make the best war movie ever made or die trying. However, the quintet of actors find themselves turned into real soldiers after director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) and explosives expert Cody (Danny McBride) make a series of very bad decisions that leave them stranded in a truly war-torn part of Southeast Asia. Will Hollywood bigwig Les Grossman (a bald-cap, chest-hair wearing Tom Cruise, barely recognizable and clearly having a blast) and Tugg's agent Rick Peck (Matthew McConaughey's best performance in years) come to their rescue after the actors have a nasty run-in with some Asian druglords or will they just file an insurance claim and bilk the incident for all the PR it's worth?

Tropic Thunder has a script that could have been a bit smarter and a director who kind of loses his pacing in the saggy middle, but the uber-talented ensemble always wins this comedy war. Clearly improvising a lot of their dialogue as they head through the jungles of Laos, these very talented actors find so many unique and challenging ways to hit your satirical funny bone that their sheer skill alone will get nearly any audience over the rough patches. Downey, in particular, is comedy gold, essentially spoofing two things in one character - pretentious method actors and the way African Americans are represented in film. Like most great comedy performances, Downey completely rocks it in the details, turning the scenes and moments that other actors would have thrown away into something worthy of Best Supporting Actor consideration. Some idiots have already accused the performance of being one-note. Ridiculous. They’re just not looking hard enough.

This twisted satire of the massive scope of Hollywood's ego is worth seeing for Downey alone (heck, it's worth seeing even just for TWO of his scenes - one with Speedman about how characters that are too mentally handicapped don't win Oscars and a great race conversation with Alpa Chino), but everyone in the ensemble excels at the little things, making moments that would have hit the cutting room floor in lesser films shine. Of course, that means Stiller as director deserves a lot of credit for the final product, both in creatively inspiring his talented team to improvise brilliantly, but also in guiding some of the best casting of the year. Having said that, I don't think Ben should have cast himself in the lead role. Ben Stiller is not the first actor to come to mind for an over-the-hill, pretentious action star. Tropic Thunder is a good comedy, but it would have been subversive, comic brilliance with an actual, once (or still) huge action star like, say, Bruce Willis in the Tugg Speedman part.

A little better casting, a little tightening of the action scenes and the story's saggy middle, and Tropic Thunder would have been a comedy classic. The odd thing is that I think it still might become just that. This is the kind of movie that is going to play very well at home and in late night "brew and view" atmospheres for years to come, and its flaws are likely to get easier and easier to overlook. Judd Apatow and others have proven that gross-out humor and sexually extreme comedy can make for box office gold, but very few directors have been willing to take on a satire as dark and daring as Tropic Thunder. For those of us who were losing hope in Mr. Stiller, it's about time.

Rating: THREE BONES

Reviewed by Brian Tallerico (MovieRetriever.com Film Critic)

Release Date: August 13, 2008

Rating: R

Starring: Ben Stiller, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Matthew McConaughey, Tom Cruise, Jay Baruchel, Nick Nolte, Brandon T. Jackson, Danny McBride, Bill Hader, and Steve Coogan

Director: Ben Stiller

Writers: Ben Stiller & Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen