Big Trouble in Little China (movie review)

• Title: Big Trouble in Little China
  
• Year: 1986
• Rating: PG-13
• Director: John Carpenter
  
• Cast: Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Kim Cattrall, James Hong, Victor Wong
  

Cocky trucker Jack Burton takes on the forces of Chinese Black Magic in the form of a 2,000 year old malignant spirit and his demonic servants. Gang fights, kidnapping, and dueling sorcerers are just a taste of what lies in store in the underworld beneath San Francisco’s Chinatown.

Rewind . . .

. . . to a time when cable TV consisted of a handful of channels showing a handful of movies. Big Trouble in Little China was one of those movies, seemingly on every weekend and generally stumbled upon while aimlessly flipping channels in an era long before DVRs, On Demand, and even the TV Guide Channel. It’s the kind of movie I probably watched 30 times before ever seeing it once all the way through. I watched it heavily edited for commercials on Saturday afternoon and for fifteen minutes while waiting for the call to dinner, in bits and pieces to fill an idle hour and as background noise when I was doing something else. I see now that it’s the sort of movie that completely works when broken into pieces — hell, you could scramble it around and it would still be entertaining — because taken on a scene-by-scene basis there is always something going on, always a reason to watch.

And watch I did, to the point of memorizing most of it. Here was something that combined the goofy fun of b-movies, the action and special-effects of Hollywood blockbusters, and the exotic appeal of Hong Kong martial arts flicks. In a time before Neo and everybody else was ‘Kung-Fu Fighting,’ Big Trouble gave you a taste of it with some wire work thrown in for good measure. While slower and cruder by today’s standards, it also avoided the constant nausea-inducing quick-cuts that have become the standard of today’s fight scenes.

One scene in particular always stuck with me — one I would never fail to watch if I came upon it by chance. Around fifteen minutes into the film, as Jack and Wang Chi — in Jack’s big rig, The Pork Chop Express — chase a car full of kidnappers down an alley in Chinatown, they come upon a funeral procession. It’s a gang with yellow headbands, carrying a coffin. Then a rival gang shows up, trimmed in red. The guns come out, the coffin is dropped — it’s full of hardware, and the poles used to carry it themselves are weapons — and the whole scene erupts in automatic fire and swinging blades.

Then the Storms show up.

Boom; one, two, three, they descend from the skies as everybody crowds back. Each Storm — in an enormous straw hat — does his own little badass kung-fu showoff move . . . the last of which, Lightning (clear antecedent to Mortal Kombat’s Raiden), is accompanied by curling electrical energy. Jack, clutching uselessly at his bootknife, floors it, and each Storm gets out of the way at the last minute. Then we see their master, Lo Pan, tall and striking in mandarin robes, light pouring from his eyes and mouth, and we know things have just taken a hard right turn into the weird.

Fast Forward . . .

. . . to a time where cynicism and CGI march lockstep at the box office, and where ‘auteur’ is the ultimate dirty word in Hollywood. John Carpenter is the John Ford of b-movie cinema, with a brisk and unadorned style that sits back and lets the story take over. But Big Trouble in Little China was no b-movie, in fact it was Carpenter’s biggest film to date in a career that had steadily been gaining mainstream following since the success of The Thing, Escape From New York, and Christine. Sadly, Big Trouble was a commercial failure when it came out — which possibly explains why it ended up on cable every weekend for the next six years.

But it has a giddy, impetuous, rough-around-the-edges b-movie feel that makes you forget the big expensive sets and somewhat-impressive-by-1986-standards special effects. Some of that may be because it was rushed into production in an attempt to get it out before another fantasy-comedy with Asian mystical elements due out the same year, The Golden Child, but I suspect mostly it is the result of Carpenter’s directorial sensibilities. The movie has a tongue-in-check satirical edge that still manages to be reverential of the pulp material it lampoons, and a colorful, imaginative aesthetic that doesn’t root it as firmly in the era of the 19080s as its contemporaries.

But mostly Big Trouble in Little China is just pure fun. From the rogue’s gallery of creatures and spirits, to the heroes themselves — Gracie Law’s aw-shucks earnestness, the impish Egg Shen, and the wise-ass posturing of Jack Burton. Indeed, Russell’s Burton is an almost singular creation: a swaggering yet lovable tough guy that actually gets the short end of every fight in the movie — save when it matters most. Either his friend Wang — whose kidnapped green-eyed girlfriend is needed by the evil spirit Lo Pan to complete the ritual that will make him flesh — takes out all the baddies before Jack is even ready, or Jack does something un-heroic like shoot the ceiling above his head and kick loose some stone that knocks him out. Jack, always game, full of bluster, is continually outclassed and out-of-his-depth, but always comes back for more. So out-of-step is this character with typical Hollywood action lead that the climatic scene between him and the main baddie is played with a ridiculous lipstick smear all over Burton’s face — the perfect touch to a film that elevates not taking itself seriously to a connoisseur’s level of refinement.

• Nostalgia Rating: Ten Feet Tall
  
• Rewatch Potential: Nearly Infinite
  
• Wilhelm Scream?: No
  
• Verdict: A cult classic that is ten times more fun and original than any big budget blockbuster to come out of the design-by-committee paint-by-numbers world of big Hollywood — the perfect thing to watch on a “dark and stormy night.”
  

What I Learned: That “it’s all in the reflexes,” and that the Chinese have a lot of hells.

Top Marks: In a movie with seven-foot tall floating ghosts, a trio of flying killers in straw hats called Rain, Thunder, and Lightning, and a puffy-faced old sorcerer-slash-bus driver who comes equipped with crystal rocket launcher, pulley crossbow, magic potion, gemstone grenade, and .44 magnum (”Make you feel good, like Dirty Harry”) it’s awfully hard to single out one thing as most memorable. Which is why I think Kurt Russell himself earns the nod — not only is he the everyman center around which all this craziness swirls, but he’s also both the comic relief and the heroic lead. I can’t think of any characters in film that combine these often antithetical traits so well in one package — Jack Burton deserves to be as much of a legend as he thinks he is.

If (When) It’s Remade: Burton will go from boob to psychotic wild man and beat up at least as many guys as Wang. Wang will be Jet Li. James Hong will again be cast as Lo Pan by unwitting studio bosses that didn’t even know he was in the first film. Also, the world will be nudged into an erratic orbit that will result in it sliding too close to the sun and obliterating all life on Earth — that is, if there is any justice.

Final Thoughts: I really wanted to see what was in the Six Demon Bag.

This review is part of an ongoing series entitled Movies of a Misspent Youth, that looks at all the great fantasy, science fiction, and horror films available to the generation of kids growing up in the boom years of the 1980s. For more in this series, please visit my Film & TV page.