Tuesday Review: Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

    It’s all in the reflexes.

    Question: Is there anything better than a John Carpenter movie? Answer: Well, if you’re talking about the director’s output in the eighties, and you’re being completely honest with your pretentious, elitist self, then… No. There is nothing better than a John Carpenter movie. The last two decades haven’t been too kind to the Master of Horror and Suspense’s career, but the man certainly doesn’t have anything to prove: from Halloween to They Live, Carpenter delivered classic after classic, be they horror film, action thriller or… martial arts comedy? Thus, we have Big Trouble in Little China, which feels like an itch that Carpenter had been aching to scratch for some time.

    Along with his number one leading man Kurt Russell, Carpenter by this time had established his own specific brand of anti-hero: cool, cynical, indifferent and thoroughly badass. With the character of Jack Burton, the pair decided to take a different route - a character who is a hero in his own mind, but who’s completely incompetent otherwise. Motor-mouthing in his John Wayne drawl, Russell is pretty fantastic as Burton - the complete opposite of Snake Plissken and R.J. Macready, but a fantastic character in his own right.

    With a few exceptions, the rest of the cast is largely filled with Asian actors - a rarity for blockbusters, especially of the 1980’s. Dennis Dun plays the real hero of the movie, Wang Chi, who at first seems like the typical minority sidekick for the great white hero, but the film cleverly twists that on its head as we learn that Wang Chi is a better fighter than Burton (and also seemingly knows everything, as his exposition-heavy dialogue will attest). James Wong gets to play the villainous sorcerer Lo Pan, a role that showcases the oft-caricatured actor is really quite good. Victor Wong also appears in the rather thankless role of Egg Shen, the mystic elder who rivals Wang Chi for the sheer amount of exposition laced into his dialogue.

    Exposition is really the killer here. W.D. Richter apparently rewrote the original script from page one, which originally took place in the 1880’s and would have been a western. But despite his best efforts, once the main thrust of the plot gets going most every exchange between the main characters consists of, “What’s that?” “Don’t you know? That’s blah blah blah, the blah blah of blah blah.” It would all get tiring, were it not for the film’s propulsive energy. Carpenter pulls out all the stops, combining all the special effects wizardry of the day with the Hong Kong infused storyline. Theirs is a purity to the old-fashioned optical animations here that you just don’t see nowadays with CGI. Also welcome are all the practical creatures on display, my favorite being Lo Pan’s floating eyeball. The actual martial arts fight scenes leave more than a little to be desired - this was long before the likes of Yuen Woo-Ping and Corey Yuen brought their legendary talents to Hollywood.

    Big Trouble in Little China is the ultimate critic-proof movie. Despite its various faults, it defies any criticisms leveled against it merely by the virtue of how much fun it is.