Ben Stiller has a new movie out: Tropic Thunder. I'm sure many of you have seen it. I went to see it last Saturday. The screening was at 7.30pm. Owing to the annoying lateness of my fellow moviegoers, all three of us were 10 minutes late to the Empire cinema...The foyer was suspiciously empty, so we had to buy our tickets from the popcorn seller. In Screen 3, the film was already in full swing as we crept in -- forced to take a seat in the neck-breaking third row. Within 5 minutes I had a terrible headache. I was half urging the film to end, which is never good. After what seemed like 30 minutes, Tom Cruise danced and the credits rolled. We noticed the credits listed Steve Coogan, who we hadn't even seen in the film!
Tropic Thunder didn't appear to be that funny, but maybe the missing 10-minutes were full of brilliance and scene-setting we sorely missed and desperately needed. The next day, I checked the cinema listings again -- something niggling away in my mind about the infuriating experience. Then it all became clear: Tropic Thunder started at 7, not 7.30! We had missed a whole 40 minutes! Even assuming there were 15 minutes of adverts and trailers, we had missed a sizeable chunk of the set-up. At work on Monday, a colleague who had seen Tropic Thunder rubbed salt into the wound by telling me the first half-hour contained all the funny bits.
So, a very frustrating situation all round. And it inspired a question: are ticket sellers at the box-office allowed to sell tickets for a film they KNOW started 40 minutes ago? Shouldn't they have mentioned that fact, at the very least? Did they really think we wanted to spend £23 on a film that started nearly an hour ago? Twats.
Consequently, my planned theatrical review of Tropic Thunder will have to wait until its disc release, so I can watch the first half. But the funniest thing I saw was a Vietnamese toddler crossing his arms and frowning. Oh, and Tom Cruise was good.
