Major-studio satire on a major-studio Vietnam War epic. The slipshod plotting, the willful misinformation about how movies are made, and the pandering to the groundlings do not close off all avenues of inspiration. Four fake trailers at the top of the movie, introducing the motley cast of the movie-within-the-movie, give a hint of the allowable latitude. The ones of the over-the-hill action star (Ben Stiller, the movie’s director and co-writer besides), the gross-out comedian (Jack Black), and the hip-hop gangsta (Brandon T. Jackson) are but a tepid warm-up to the topper, the one of the multiple-Oscar-winning thespian from Down Under (Robert Downey, Jr.), a monastery love story called Satan’s Alley, a tony period piece aimed at the art circuit: the narrator’s clipped phrases, pregnant pauses, and portentous tones are dead-on. Downey dominates the action in the Vietnam jungle as well, his character having undergone a “controversial pigmentation alteration” to play an African-American foot soldier, emphatically putting the grunt in the grunt. His only competition for acting honors comes from outside the jungle (though Nick Nolte has his moments as a wizened Vietnam-vet advisor, the company’s guide to the Heart of Darkness), back home in Hollywood, where a heavily disguised Tom Cruise models a bald dome, bushy chest and arms, a bumpy nose, and a padded middle as a Harvey Weinsteinian bullying studio boss. (Funny notion: his everyday tough talk goes beyond anything ever heard by a cutthroat Asian heroin dealer and hostage taker.) If nothing else, the raging megalomania serves as a full-coverage mask for the actor’s chronic overacting. Similarly, the gut-spilling, blood-squirting gore in the movie — at least the gore in the movie-within-the-movie — is made more palatable by the satire. Through it, you can have a retrospective laugh at the pretensions and pieties of Apocalypse Now, Platoon, Rambo, Saving Private Ryan, what-you-will. With Steve Coogan, Danny McBride, Matthew McConaughey. (2008) — Duncan Shepherd
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