Tropic Thunder is a 2008 action comedy film produced and directed by Ben Stiller and written by Stiller, Justin Theroux, and Etan Cohen. The film stars Stiller, Jack Black and Robert Downey, Jr. as a group of prima donna actors making a Vietnam War film when their fed-up writer and director decide to abandon them in the middle of the Vietnamese jungle, forcing them to fight their way out.

Stiller initially had the idea for the film while playing a small part in Empire of the Sun and later brought on Theroux and Cohen to help him complete the script. After the film was greenlit in 2006, filming took place in 2007 on the Hawaiian island of Kauai over 13 weeks, and was deemed the largest film production in the island's history. Tropic Thunder had a massive marketing promotion, including posting faux websites for the characters, fake films, and products shown within the film; showing numerous screenings; and selling the fictional energy drink advertised in the film.

Tropic met controversy among the disability advocacy community prior to its release in the United States on August 13, 2008. It received generally positive reviews with 83% of reviews positive and an average normalized score of 71% according to the review aggregator websites Rotten Tomatoes and Metacritic, respectively. It earned $26 million in its opening weekend and retained the number one position for its first three consecutive weekends of release. The film went on to gross over $180 million worldwide.

Plot

During the filming of Vietnam veteran John "Four Leaf" Tayback's (Nick Nolte) memoir Tropic Thunder, the stars—fading action luminary Tugg Speedman (Ben Stiller), five-time Academy Award-winning method actor Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), rapper Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson), low-brow drug-addled comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black), and character actor Kevin Sandusky (Jay Baruchel)—behave unreasonably, resulting in a $4 million explosion going off with no cameras rolling. With filming a month behind schedule only five days into shooting, the media dubs the production "the most expensive war movie never made". Rookie director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan) is ordered by studio executive Les Grossman (Tom Cruise) to get the production back on track or risk having it shut down.

Acting on Tayback's advice, Cockburn drops the spoiled actors into the middle of the jungle, where he installs hidden cameras and special-effect explosions rigged so he can film "guerrilla-style". The actors have only a map and a scene listing to guide them to the helicopter waiting at the end of the jungle. Shortly afterward, the director is blown up by a derelict land mine left by the French during the First Indochina War, but only Lazarus, and to a certain extent Sandusky, realize his death was real.

Unbeknownst to the actors, they are dropped in the middle of the Golden Triangle, the home of the heroin-producing Flaming Dragon gang. The Dragons believe the actors to be Drug Enforcement Administration agents. When Tayback and pyrotechnics man Cody Underwood (Danny R. McBride) attempt to locate the now-deceased director, they are captured by the drug producers, at which point Tayback is exposed as a fraud when the prosthetic hooks on his hands fall off. The actors continue to trek through the hostile jungle. After Lazarus and Sandusky discover that Speedman is leading them the wrong way, they split off from him with Portnoy and Chino, and leave Speedman continuing to follow the film's script while the others attempt to escape the jungle.