“Tropic Thunder” might well have been named “The Grudge.”

In an April interview with Los Angeles Daily News journalist Glenn Whipp, Ben Stiller brightly confessed the source of his latest itchy comedy: a twenty-year-old grudge against the director of “Platoon.” “I got there, and Oliver Stone looked at me and, said, ‘You’re cute.’ ‘You’re cute,’ that was it. I never got to audition.” It’s hard to imagine those words in Anne Meara’s mouth, let alone Oliver Stone’s.

“Tropic Thunder,” the result of that long-nurtured chip on the shoulder, directed, co-produced, co-written and starring Stiller, finds him playing Tugg Speedman, a desperately needy, deeply shallow actor in an immensely over-budgeted Vietnam war movie to end all war movies. His cohort of pampered performers-turned-grunts includes Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), a fat actor from a movie series called “The Fatties” who farts a lot, and Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.). Among other characters, Nick Nolte as the author of the project’s source novel, is cruelly wasted; Brandon T. Jackson as Alpa Chino, a young black actor, makes almost no impression whatsoever; and a pyrotechnics guy played by Danny McBride (”Pineapple Express”) is almost the only breath of oxygen in the rank result.

Did you hear the joke about Robert Downey, Jr.? He’s in blackface. He’s an Australian actor who wants shiny metal trinkets so badly he does the opposite of Michael Jackson’s self-mutilation: he has his skin darkened. Hey! Stop it. Don’t laugh yet. Stop. Where the tragic case of Jackson’s self-mutilation carries layers upon layers of historical and psychological implication, what does this movie do? Lazarus can’t stop speaking street! Until he slips and he’s speaking Aussie! Downey’s eyes, ordinarily one of his most expressive features, are seldom in play. Downey’s debut as a child actor was in a film by his father, whose most accomplished, rudest comedy was “Putney Swope,” in which a black man is elevated to the heights of the advertising industry in 1969. Memorable line: “Putney is confusing originality with obscenity.”

Speaking of obscenity, Tom Cruise plays a grotesquely fat, hairy, bald middle-aged studio executive whose dance moves are as repulsive as his “Risky Business” ones were frisky. But it turns to pissy business when you discover that his character—Les Grossman, is that an Albanian name?—is like a child actor trying, badly, to improvise Mametian swears. “Fuck shit cocksucker shit!” isn’t quite as funny as, say, this genius bit from “American Buffalo”: “Only, and I’m not, I don’t think, casting anything on anyone: from the mouth of a Southern bulldyke asshole ingrate of a vicious nowhere cunt can this trash come. And I take nothing back, and I know you’re close with them.” Stiller and co-writer Justin Theroux come within at least a galaxy’s distance of that outburst with Jack White sweating strung-out inanities about a “hobo’s dick cheese” and vivid descriptions of the gay sex he’ll perform on the other characters if they just untie him and feed him blow. Grossman’s hands and wrists are made up with the most skin-cracking, angry pink-white-flaking eczema. And the character might as well take a shit in the middle of the floor in scenes where he compulsively gyrates his woman-hipped bottom in the audience’s face.

“Tropic Thunder” is the kind of heavy meta that might work in sketches, such as the short-lived “Ben Stiller Show,” shot on a budget of a dollar and a dime. But as a want-to-be-painfully-hip comedy about soul-killing horseshit, it manages handily to be more the thing itself than its reflection. The reasons some writers claim to resent movies like “Fight Club” and “The Dark Knight”—that somehow it’s insincere for an artist to make a decamillion-dollar movie that satirizes consumer culture or that suggests the entire political culture has gone over to the “dark side” of brutal, fearful, vigilantism, is one I seldom feel attracted toward. “Tropic Thunder”? Twenty years of overcontemplation of old ideas in hundred-million-dollar full flower.

While there is much sautéed in the behind-the-scenes pandemonium of “Hearts of Darkness,” Eleanor Coppola, George Hickenlooper and Fax Bahr’s documentary about the making of “Apocalypse Now,” not a single instant strikes as cleanly in human, humorous, behavioral or poetic grace as the outtake of Marlon Brando working his wind through an arch peroration, pausing, gacking and saying, much as he asks, “Milk Dud?” in “The Formula,” in character and in beautiful cadence, “I swallowed a bug.”

John Toll, who less than three years ago was cinematographer on Terence Malick’s luminous “The New World,” is called upon to make images that look like they were shot in the Philippines in the 1970s and developed there in a ditch. But as images go, the ones of Ben Stiller I’ll always treasure? The look on his face in “Your Friends And Neighbors” when Catherine Keener shouts during coitus, “Is there any chance you’re gonna shut the fuck up? Let’s just do it. I don’t need the narration, okay?” And stabbing a neck vein with a hypodermic in “Permanent Midnight” with an aggrieved grimace of “Hey, dad! Looking at me yet?”

By Ray Pride

Only Timur Bekmambetov could have made “Wanted.” And that’s a grand thing.

Opening with the familiar Universal logo that has sparkling space dust girdling the globe, we’re quickly thrown into a comic-book adaptation written by Scots by a Kazakh director who made his name in Russia, set in a lustrously shot Chicago, with a Scottish male lead and an American female. We’re quickly propelled into a loonily labyrinthine, gratifyingly Byzantine weave of immaculately produced visual filmmaking. “Wanted” is not breathless in the sense of Michael Bay’s accelerated cutting (although the cinematographer, Mitchell Amundsen, shot “Transformers” and knows from gleam).

Bekmambetov’s “Nightwatch” (2004) and “Daywatch” (2006) were reportedly Russia’s biggest hits ever, but didn’t cross over here. Of “Daywatch,” I noted that his “full-tilt willingness to be incomprehensible is his keenest talent,” and of “Nightwatch,” its “convoluted, grimy, gruesome, Gothic, Slavic, giddy humbug.” Ah, but now. “Wanted” is a tonally aggressive, wildly expressionistic, deeply satisfying film, a sleekly machined action powerhouse, words I hardly expected to type this summer.

Wesley Gibson (James McEvoy, sporting a fine American accent) is a lowly office worker who takes anti-anxiety medication and knows that his beautiful-but-shrill girlfriend is having sex with one of his coworkers on their Ikea kitchen table. A voice-over by this cubicle-bound sweet-faced nerd is profane and echoes with hapless exasperation the self-realization gab of “Fight Club.” (A character named Darden may just echo “Tyler Durden.”) But that’s only a component of the many layers offered up by Bekmambetov and screenwriters Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan (from the comic-book series by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones). Bekmambetov, like George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson before him, owns his own effects house, and there are generous swirls and dabs of technique throughout this story of a young man who’s enlisted by a secret society of assassins who’ve persisted for a thousand years, led by Morgan Freeman, and whose mostly silent teacher of the arts hardcore is embodied by Angelina Jolie. (She has fun.)

Bekmambetov’s going for baroque at each available instant. Yet on recognizable streets in the Loop and near North, atop El trains always curving or going under low underpasses, he elevates and heightens the city in rare fashion, much like Michael Mann or Andy Davis (”The Fugitive,” “Code of Silence”). Lake and Wabash; Wacker and Wabash; lower Wacker: all stylishly rendered. The multiple uses of and references to the El are integral to the tale, not visual or sonic scene-setting. (An opening shootout that takes place partly atop the Carbide and Carbon Building, home of the Hard Rock Hotel, is immaculately cut and composed for maximum narrative and visceral effect.)

These filmmakers get Chicago. Bekmambetov uses everything at his disposal, adapting more than lifting styles, techniques and gags that have been in movies by David Fincher and the Wachowskis, for instance. But this florid, perfervid visual style delivers. No romcom-style reverse-angle tick-tocks of conversation. Yet the rush of imagery doesn’t suggest videogames as much as a romping pulp infraction.

Credit, too, must go to Chicago names in the credits likely to have something to do with the look, such as location manager Mark Mamalakis, as well as prop work that includes the characteristic Loop newspaper kiosks with headlines about a violent act, all done in the correct style of the newspapers on display. A character back at tough-love assassin HQ drinks from a Bears glass. A restorative bath involving some kind of chemical-wax compound comes to resemble shards of broken ice eddying around Wesley’s face (Alexander Nevsky much, Timur?) The costume design, Varvara Avdyushko, is also typical of the attention to detail: everyone’s garb is slightly heightened; Wesley’s costumes are plain and tend to beige and brown, yet are immaculately refined.

Even the stripped-down, quintessential cod-philosophical twaddle satisfies. “Why are you here?” “I don’t know who I am!” “That’s good enough for now.” And when you can pull off Morgan Freeman intoning, “We call this the loom of fate,” causing you to grin rather than laugh out loud, something’s very right. You come to accept characters slinging armory like a chef with an omelet pan or a tennis player at the top of their game. The El itself becomes one more weapon in their expressive arsenal.

With such impressive filmmaking in every technical respect, and decent respect for the comic-book flummery while acknowledging its essential silliness, you want something to tie it together, a deeper undercurrent other than the obligatory Zennish bromides. Perhaps an undercurrent about terrorist cells? Mmm… No. [AN ALLUSION TO THE ENDING FOLLOWS.] The man who made his name in Russia pulls it off with gleeful aplomb. In the last scene, which is one of a corkscrew-laden movie’s most elaborate twist-and-turn sequences, when the last one standing shows how it’s done and confronts the audience head-on with a profane provocation? It’s the grace note: the winner who takes all, head spinning throughout from Kremlin-style hall of mirrors reversals, now resembles one triumphant figure on the world stage: Vladimir Putin. Za vas, Timur! Za vas! “Wanted” opens Friday.

By Ray Pride

“Pink is the navy blue of India.”

That’s one of the better-known epigrams of the late, compulsively pulse-taking fashion editor Diana Vreeland. An observation that washed over me after leaving a Thursday night preview of “Speed Racer” in IMAX: this thundering puppy is rife with cultural references and multiple languages and bursting design details that should make it appeal to a broad cross-section of the moviegoing world. (Including India, which could take the great washes of pink as more holy than girly.)

Or at least it seemed that way until the weekend, when the opening worldwide grosses seemed to suggest that all those potentially intrigued audiences would not be dragged screaming and spending into the theater. (There’s no way they could already have known about the repugnant tubby little brother and his gum-baring chimpanzee sidekick.)

In their first directorial effort since ending “The Matrix” trilogy—“V for Vendetta” was shepherded by their longtime second James McTeigue—the Chicago-born Wachowski brothers dig deep into the traditions and stylistics of anime and their own cultural toy box to create a bold yet somehow hermetic movie with fantastically intricate design and technique that somehow seems not to fall into any known demographic. (Plus, Emile Hirsch, who plays Speed in his first role since “Into the Wild,” fired his agents on Monday, a kind of review without words.) “Deliciously aggravating” would be a compliment in my devil’s dictionary, but I doubt it would send anyone to the Cineplex door. While there were jokes from the elder heights of film cricketry about sugar rushes and candy coatings and epileptic fits, “Speed Racer” is a less-than-obliterating experience. Noisy and bursting with eyeball kicks, “Speed Racer” is a Ritalin-deprived formalist treat, sort of like David LaChappelle compositions brought to asexual life. (First reviews made a lot of candy and cereal metaphors, so let’s not fail the assignment by noting that the bold color palette is often like Fruit Loops in a morphine drip. “Futurama” on a mild dose of LSD?)

But there aren’t that many formalism-oriented, technique-loving viewers, it seems, near the 3,850 locations in North America, who might appreciate, say, such iconic-unironic elements as the Wachowskis’ use of a digital “wipe” across the screen, making transitions by passing close-ups of characters from right to left, much in the way that layers of cels function in traditional sorts of film animation. (Imagine the characters in low-budget TV-made series like the original “Speed Racer” or “Johnny Quest” forever moving across planes rather than into and out of the perceived “ground” of the screen.)

More bits: the opening credits for Warner Bros., co-financier Village Roadshow and Silver Pictures are festooned with Oskar Fischinger-style bursts of geometric animation (the sprightliest logo-damage since the neon bars slashing the logos at the front of “Oceans 13.”) The impossibly blue skies in the early flashbacks are the blue of a Benadryl commercial in CGI heaven. The detestable boy-tubby little brother, Spritle, is seen in Paul Frank monkey pajamas while the one-note chimpanzee, Chim-Chim, wears similar flannel pjs with a boy’s head on them. The blend of hyper-saturated green against red, impossible in strictly photochemical terms, is as lush as that contrast in “Amelie.” A brassy exclamation of “Omigod! Was that a ninja?!” matches the self-consciously unselfconscious “Oh, that kid is wily.” (And I would like to visit the unlikely “Aqueducts of Sassicaia” to find how intoxicating its waters might be.)

As in “Fight Club” and a few other recent pictures, “Speed Racer” is also a deca-million-dollar fable about how corporations can stifle creativity—“That’s because the sponsors control the media!” The mixed message has its charm; while Motorola walkie-talkies and Cheerios get overt product placement, most of the brands on view are keening gibberish, towering neon monuments in more alphabets and languages than I could recognize, and there are myriad appearances by announcers and characters speaking languages other than English. It seems less a commercial strategy by the Wachowskis as a philosophical one: to incorporate as many forms of communication and color-blind ethnicity as possible, much as they did with the “Matrix” pictures. There are other oddities, including a bribe-by-plushie interlude that seems more adult than some of the movie’s dispensable bumbling gangster caricatures. The Racer X character is also given an eccentric late passage of explaining the positive aspects of his radical identity-assignment surgery to his younger brother.

“It’s a whole new world, baby, it’s a whole new world,” sounds self-congratulatory out of the mouth of a character after the gravitationally impossible yet beautifully stitched final race, yet there are elements of technique here that will be as influential, to the right crew members of future films, as the infernal “bullet time” effect of “The Matrix.” Whether or not “Speed Racer” makes its financiers’ money back, it’s still going to be more influential than any undiscerning reviewer realizes.

“Speed Racer” is now playing in 35mm and IMAX.