In Tropic Thunder, Ben Stiller plays beefcake action star Tugg Speedman, who made his name in a film where the earth ceased to turn, causing a catastrophic ice age. "Who left the fridge open?" he quips in his gravelly voice before singlehandedly restoring movement to the planet with megaton explosives and daring journeys to the earth’s core. Sadly, this is not that film, but rather a stupendously dull remake of Robert Wise’s 1951 sci-fi classic in which a strange alien creature comes to Earth. Keanu Reeves stars, giving the kind of torpid performance that lesser beings can only approximate by necking a hundredweight of Temazepam. The lights are on at the top of the spaceship, but there’s no one at the controls.
In this new version, Keanu and his fellow aliens land in Central Park in a giant, glistening globe; and, having been fired on by the terrified US army in the traditional pointless manner, he reveals that he has a 21st-century, Al Gore-ish problem on his mind. We are despoiling the Earth itself, in punishment for which he and his alien confederates are solemnly minded to zap the living bejeepers out of us.
The alien is called Klaatu, and Keanu Reeves (whose first name doesn’t sound that much different) is perhaps the only plausible casting, given that David Bowie is now too advanced in years to fall to earth again without breaking something. The tough US secretary of defence is played by Kathy Bates, very much channelling the spirit of Hillary Clinton in her 3am-crisis-phonecall mode. As ever, Keanu’s speech patterns really only suit a non-Earthling role. There’s something in that halting, quizzical delivery – which for a second promises droll comedy, and in the next second delivers only a baffling blankness – which indicates that carbon-based life forms are not entirely his thing. Certainly, it looks as if he doesn’t have the software to run the normal programmes of human interaction.
The idea is that he forms a piquant, platonic friendship with a beautiful scientist, Dr Helen Benson, played by Jennifer Connelly – who has a stepkid who is so creepily cute, it looks as if she might actually have created him in the "lab" in which she solemnly appears at the beginning of the film, earnestly teaching her attentive "students" about the kinds of virus they might expect to encounter on the moons of Saturn. Thankfully, though, there is no love scene between Dr Benson and the alien. If Keanu/Klaatu proposed to extrude a purple phallus from his forehead or his ear and pleasure Helen with that, then we would all be glad of a film that halted at the bedroom door. The most bizarre moment arrives when Helen introduces Klaatu to her mentor Professor Barnhardt, played by a deadpan John Cleese, who has allegedly won a Nobel prize for his work on "biological altruism". (Bit of a thin year, perhaps?) If Douglas Adams were in charge of this remake, it would be a lot smarter.
