Happy-Go-Lucky

Flash of Genius

Eagle Eye

Ghost Town

The Duchess

Hounddog

Burn After Reading

Hamlet 2

The House Bunny

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Elegy

Bottle Shock

Try to see the mercilessly funny, defiantly R-rated action comedy Tropic Thunder before anyone wrecks all the best raunchy jokes and major surprises. In fact, just stop reading this and go buy a ticket. The movie is that strong. It's a genre-defying satire, an action flick, a gut-buster and gut-churner, all in one. It's also outrageously funny, in-your-face entertainment. In Ben Stiller's first directorial outing since Zoolander, he also stars as a dimwitted, spoiled-rotten action film star left abandoned on a remote jungle location by a director (Steve Coogan) who has gotten totally fed up with Stiller's and his co-stars' egos and excesses -- those co-stars being Jack Black, playing a comic known for doing multiple roles in gross-out comedies like The Fatties: Fart 2, along with man-of-the-hour Robert Downey Jr. as an Oscar-baiting, highly pretentious Australia Serious Method Thespian (think Russell Crowe) who has dyed his skin black because he's playing a role originally intended for a black man. Their filmmaking mission hopelessly bungled in the jungle, the actors convince themselves that they've been deliberately shoved into a kind of total immersion boot camp designed to pump up the reality of the Vietnam-era Apocalypse Now-wannabe epic they're making. Instead, the dangers they're facing -- from the elements, a drug gang and the mess they encounter trying to save an embattled village -- are very real.

Stiller has said he's been trying to hatch the project for about 10 years but that incubation period must have helped because the movie, co-written by Justin Theroux and Etan Cohen, spills over with smart, fearless laughs and situations of the kind that encourage a cast like Brandon T. Jackson, Jay Baruchel, Nick Nolte and Tom Cruise (in one of several cameos) to go way out there in ways that it would be criminal to say too much about. Stiller and Black are funnier than they've been in way too long, and the only thing that ought to be said here about Downey Jr.'s sensational, daredevil performance is that it's a rush to watch him bat it out of the park in yet another career high. In this tail end of an uneven summer movie season, Tropic Thunder is just about the best time you can have at the movies.

by Stephen Rebello

Credit: Merie Weismiller Wallace/©2008 DreamWorks LLC. All Rights Reserved.