Tropic Thunder wasn't the movie I thought it was going to be. First I feared that the movie was going to be a Ben Stiller/Jack Black brand of over-the-top farce that usually signals them pandering cynically to the worst of the movie-going audience. But this Apocalypse Now/Hearts of Darkness send-up serves as a scathing critique of both Hollywood and the people who make such films, from top to bottom(feeder): from producers to directors to movie stars to agents. The movie even takes time to do a nod toward the book industry, with its Million Little Pieces brand of literary fraud.

Then my fears tilted the other way, that maybe the movie was too inside. However, this points to just how saturated we are with the comings and goings of our Hollywood royalty. There is no inside left.

I expected a certain level of wrongness, with some very un-PC humor; but in that regard, I was rather let down. There was none of the Borat brand laugh-out-loud-at-the-wrong. The satire was so on point, you almost couldn't laugh, though at times the movie did exude a sort of smug air of being extremely pleased with itself.

In the final analysis, Tropic Thunder is about the artifice that surrounds our lives. We see a band of actors trying to be authentic, who find themselves on a journey to figure out what it means to become real. A real author (behind the lies), a real story to connect to, real characters, and real performances.

Robert Downey Jr, especially coming on the heels of his performance in Iron Man, owns Hollywood by the part of the anatomy Ben Stiller kept taking shots to.