So we see the Hollywood agent played by Matthew McConnaguaheeeyyamalamadingdongjeyhey on his Gulfstream G-5 jet, kicking back with a martini and a smile as he flies back from Vietnam. Did he betray the Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) character, accepting the jet but still going to Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller)'s rescue?
And who’s the young man or kid in the jet with him?
The kid is his son. You see a picture of him earlier in the movie.
As for the first part, good question. My guess is you’re right.
You could be right, but at the time I assumed that the jet was the price of keeping quiet, that Rick Peck wouldn’t publicize Grossman’s willingness to let such a huge movie star die for the insurance money.
His son, as drm says. When we first see the agent, he’s in his office on the phone with Tugg Speedman, and at one part of the conversation Peck mentions Speedman’s attempts to adopt a child (one of the numerous quick, throwaway and hilarious pokes at Hollywood stars), and then he says something like “Well at least you get to choose yours” and looks over at the photograph of his obviously retarded son, which was also a poke at Hollywood people because it’s a dirty little secret that rich and fabulous Hollywood people also have kids with mental and physical disabilities, but the fabulous folk try to hide them. All those protests over the movie from disability groups focused on the “full retard” speech (which, dammit, was ANOTHER poke at Hollywood, not at the developmentally disabled) totally ignored the Rick Peck’s son part of the movie.
God I love that film, one of the funniest I’ve ever seen! It was definitely one of my favorite films from last year, in the top 5, and my favorite comedy (Burn After Reading came second, much to my surprise). I saw it 4-5 times in the theater and it will never get old for me. And how great were those ending credits too? Second only to Slumdog Millionaire as the best from last year. I love that song (“The Name of the Game”) that incorporated all the best lines in the film. It’s not normally “my kind” of music, but it’s so brilliant I love it. It’s makes me smile. The whole soundtrack is amazing.
Thanks. I’d totally forgotten the “at least you get to choose yours” snark. I get it now.
The kid who’s McConaughey’s son appears in the viral video. There he’s presented as being overweight and perhaps a bit disinterested in real life, but not retarded or anything.
That was cute, I hadn’t seen it before, but the kid is not playing the character he played in Tropic Thunder (Peck’s son), he’s playing Stiller’s nephew, someone else entirely. Going strictly by what was shown in Tropic Thunder, I’d still say the son was supposed to be mentally retarded.
Sorry for the very late post here. I actually thought that they were targeting John Travolta’s son for some unknown reason, either as a credit to his memory or something as the actor looks a little similar to some pictures I had seen and was a straight up memory queue for me…
While I like this film a lot, there’s one element that vaguely annoys me - unreliable narration. The movie starts with some onscreen text, read by Nick Nolte that says, in part:
Amusing, to be sure. Except later we find out Nolte’s character (ostensibly the soldier who was being rescued, which already creates an inconsistency) was never in Vietnam at all and the entire rescue mission was fictional, including (presumably) the other soldiers and the other books.
The narration is spoken by Nolte’s character. So he’s lying to us just like he’s lying to the other characters.
Why would he make up other books about the rescue mission? That just invites people to seek out these other soldier-authors and discover they don’t exist.
People get away with telling lies all the time. Usually by adding in convincing details like that. The details make the lie sound true so people believe the lie and don’t bother checking if the convincing details are real.