Tropic Thunder

To peg Tropic Thunder as a satire of moviemaking is to limit its anarchic, outlandish appeal. It’s like saying South Park is about an elementary school.

Tropic Thunder has a secret weapon, which gives it an all-but-free pass when dealing with the forces of political correctness: The movie is laugh-until-your-stomach-hurts hilarious.

It's raunchy, outspoken -- and also a smart and agile dissection of art, fame, and the chutzpah of big-budget productions.

Tropic Thunder is fabulously funny entertainment. Smart, sharp, well-written, and wildly well-acted, it cleverly singes self-obsessed stars and Hollywood's warped ways.

The sum is infinitely greater than the parts in this hilarious ensemble comedy that proves Ben Stiller to be a film director capable of so much more than we've seen from him in the past.

It mocks big-budget movies with lots of bullets and explosions while delivering a big-budget movie with lots of bullets and explosions.

Considerably better than Stiller’s previous film, Zoolander. It’s the kind of summer comedy that rolls in, makes a lot of people laugh and rolls on to video.

Gory, vulgar and wickedly funny. Easily the summer's best comedy.

Slices and dices Hollywood ambition and delivers a raucous satire of movie business egos and war movie cliches. Hardly any sacred cow survives this tipping spree as Tropic Thunder delivers a constant stream of barbed, nasty fun.

No women appear in Tropic Thunder, but that only enhances the satiric effect: Populated with bad ideas, Hollywood has gone sterile.

Tropic Thunder can be silly, shallow and way too inside. But how do you hate on a movie that is willing to do anything for a smile?

In its heart, this is a film made by artists who love movies and the people who make them, and that affection permeates every frame.

Tropic Thunder might not be the film to take your vet uncle or your overly PC girlfriend to see, but it's among the funniest Hollywood blockbusters in recent memory.

A lively, layered comedy packed with cheap but hilarious goofs on Hollywood, from fake trailers for horrible (yet strangely familiar) movies to roman à clef parodies of Hollywood personalities to actors and celebrities outright mocking themselves.

For the most part, Stiller's satire hits its marks with a hard rattle, and in the ruthless movie producer, it delivers Tom Cruise's best performance since Magnolia.

Tropic Thunder is one aggressive mofo of a Tinseltown slam. If it weren't created by certified A-list talents trading on both their reputations and their reasons for being, it would be career suicide for all involved.

The movie can't keep up with itself, but during the best gags, I laughed as hard as I have all year.

Stiller is at his best when he has a specific target in mind, and he lets go full blast on Hollywood.

This is Stiller's magnum opus, a brilliantly broad character farce that should do what Stallone and all his steroids never could -- end the Vietnam War, the Hollywood version anyway.

Tropic Thunder tiptoes to the fine line between irony and insight and blows it to smithereens. It's hilarious.

The movie feels like a consciously happy accident whose offenses (mocking a people who'd worship a turkey about mental illness) are roughly balanced by actors gouging out their own narcissism.

There is thunderous laughter from start to finish in what will undoubtedly go down as the most outrageous comedy of the year.

Two words: Tom Cruise. I won't spill the beans on his propulsive, demonic and garbage-mouthed little part, but Tropic Thunder confirms my long-held suspicion that he's a character actor trapped in a leading man's body.

The funniest movie to hit theaters this year, Tropic Thunder is a dead-on skewering of Hollyweird and its pampered, overpaid actor boys and bloated production budgets.

Tropic Thunder is all over the place, but it's hard to get too tough on a Hollywood satire that in the end loves Hollywood so much that it's just not going to take any prisoners.

With its repetitious passages of stumble-in-the-jungle slapstick and geysers of in-jokes, Tropic Thunder finally is more successful as a critique of Hollywood movies than as a Hollywood comedy.

It appears as though Hollywood saved its best comedy of the summer for last. In the season's twilight comes Tropic Thunder, a side-splitting exercise in humor that takes no prisoners in its two-hour runtime.

Ben Stiller's Tropic Thunder is such a sharply lacerating satire of Hollywood excess that it sometimes ends up cutting itself.

It's definitely not for everybody. But it's also very funny as a no-holds-barred, frat-house-party comedy.

Some of the jokes work wonderfully; sometimes the movie feels nearly as deluded as its actors.

Tropic Thunder works double duty. It's both a sharp satire of filmland's bigger-is-better mind-set and a prime example of the heavyhanded era it stands in.

You're more likely to appreciate Thunder if you think of it as a sketch comedy show, with some sketches that work and some that don't.

If you're offended by Tropic Thunder, well, you're supposed to be. But you're also supposed to laugh at how shrewd it is about being offensive. Don't worry if that's confusing; there's plenty of company up there on the screen.

The great majority of the film succeeds because it's so often spit-take funny and the actors are willing to punch a hole in their tabloid-inflated personas.

The set-up is a little incoherent and like the movies spoofed it all gets to be a bit too much. But a lot of the film looks great and is pretty funny.

There are some wildly funny scenes, a few leaden ones and others that are scattershot, with humorous satire undercut by over-the-top grisliness. Still, when it's funny, it's really funny.

The movie expands, then grows smaller. It never ceases to win big laughs, but it's like an accordion that keeps blasting as it shrinks to the size of a concertina.

Tropic Thunder passes for "daring" in a movie era notably short on risk-taking. In the case of Downey, that daring is earned. Otherwise, we're watching a Hollywood satire that, in the end, is more Hollywood than satire.

Reflecting its action-comedy crossover status, there are some moments that are flat-out funny and some surprisingly intense stunt sequences.

The film might not be a spoof of action films but it pulls no punches when it comes to Hollywood. It is especially brutal with what have become cliched actors.

Coarse, crude, merciless and often very funny, Tropic Thunder spatters the screen with so many outrageous jokes and so much merciless satire that it can exhaust you -- in a pleasant way, mind you.

One part Rambo, one part Apocalypse Now and one part Bowfinger, its comedy manages to be both broadly absurd and knowingly on-target about Hollywood.

The film falls prey to what it's satirizing -- it's not quite smart enough to pull off what it's attempting.

In the annals of movies about making movies, Tropic Thunder will have topical currency and garner laughs long after the end credits roll.

Tropic Thunder is a full-bore, no-boundaries, equal opportunity offender.

Although this ­satire of Hollywood inanity isn't the comic ­classic it could have been, Downey's gonzo performance is a must-see.

This is the closest in his directing that Stiller has come to his outlandish cult hit Zoolander, in which he played a jealous male model.

It's the kind of movie in which famous people make fun of other famous people, which is something not-famous people enjoy because it makes it seem like everybody's part of one big family.

Stiller is on to something. In an age when self-reverence has made the Oscars all but unwatchable, Stiller pokes a sharp stick at Hollywood pomposity, with the precision of a guy who knows where to aim.

Like most expensive Hollywood movies, Tropic Thunder wants to be all things to all people. Usually, this never works. But, in this case, it halfway does.

What you'll remember about Tropic Thunder is that Tom Cruise is the funniest actor in it.

Tropic Thunder is an above- par parody film. It has a higher IQ and deeper talent than Superhero Movie, Meet the Spartans and the like. Still, it remains kin to all those half-baked spoofs in which the filmmakers go for the easy and familiar.

Tropic Thunder is an eminently quotable big-budget summer comedy that succeeds in its lowbrow mission.

The frustratingly uneven comedy Tropic Thunder has moments of full-on, bust-a-gut hilarity, along with long stretches where you can hear the crickets chirping in the theater.

Tropic Thunder is just sophomoric enough to offend. And while it is also funny, it is without the empathy or compassion to cause us to wonder why we are laughing.

Jack Black going through withdrawal is even less funny than Jack Black not going through withdrawal. Every second he is on screen in this film is a second wasted.

Tropic Thunder is too much promise and not enough delivery.

An erratic, funny and disjointed riot of preposterous action and politically incorrect laugh-bombs.

That Robert Downey Jr. manages to make it through Tropic Thunder without being attacked on screen by representatives of the NAACP proves that he truly is the man of the summer.

While there are plenty of comedic opportunities explored in Stiller's medley of movie-industry and moviemaking clichés, few of them are as cutting as the film would like to think.

Inspired cameos from Tom Cruise and Matthew McConaughey contribute to a film that might not add up to much but has more riotous moments than the last few Stiller and Black movies combined.

Tropic Thunder spends so much time straining to be outrageous that it ends up looking lame.

Simply put: Ben Stiller used to be unafraid of pointed mockery, but nowadays he pulls his punches. His new movie, Tropic Thunder, just isn't funny.