Director: Ben Stiller
Cast: Ben Stiller, Jack Black, Robert Downey Jr., Tom Cruise
Have I Seen It Before: Oh, sure. What else was there to do in the summer of 2008 but see whatever Robert Downey Jr. movie was coming down the pike?
Did I Like It: At the core, its a pretty funny comedy that manages to actually channel the scope and energy of the movies—chief among them Apocalypse Now (1979) and Hearts of Darkness (1991) with more than a little bit of Platoon (1986) thrown in—it mocks.
Obviously, there’s going to be some things in the film that don’t age well. The lengths to which Kirk Lazarus (Downey Jr.) tries to get into the head of Lincoln Osiris is not something that would pass the smell test today. Tugg Speedman’s (Stiller) futile attempt to reach for respectability in Simple Jack got a fair amount of guff at the time of release. But both of those elements are more about the foolishness of movie actors blindly reaching for those portrayals without really thinking about the limits of their own believability and good sense.
While whispers still exist that Les Grossman (Cruise) will get his own spin-off film one day (it doesn’t really feel like the kind of film that Cruise could possibly be talked into anymore; then again, it didn’t really feel like that back then, either), I’d submit that his is the character which ages most poorly. He is a riff on Hollywood assholes like Scott Rudin and Harvey Weinstein, but never is he played as a fool. Quite to the contrary, he’s a brash villain one can’t help but wish they were more like. He’s an ugly little man who has commanded every room he’s entered since the 80s. The film loves him in all his reprehensibility, and I admit I even like him.
But I probably shouldn’t.