Big Trouble in Little China

Depending on whom you ask, John Carpenter’s 1986 action adventure was either a complete turkey or an underappreciated gem; widely despised at the time, it’s now a firm favourite and guilty pleasure for many. A spontaneous purchase of a double-DVD provided an opportunity to weigh up the pros and cons. The takeaway; it’s an unusual, swaggering action film that generally avoids the stereotypes of the genre it satirises, and works far better now than then.

Racism is a problem with many 80’s blockbusters; even the Indiana Jones films have some rather painful streaks of xenophobia. With fiendish Chinese villains, Big Trouble in Little China doesn’t wholly solve the problem, but a largely Chinese cast at least provide some context in an unusual setting. WD Richter’s update on a Old West script sees Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) drive his Pork Chop Express rig into San Francisco’s Chinatown to collect on a gambling debt; diverted to the airport, he gets waylaid by a kidnapping, and agrees to help Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) track down the missing girl. She’s the fiancé of Wang Chi (Dennis Dun), Jack Burton’s best pal, and the trio are quickly immersed in a world of monsters, magic and martial arts as they fight to save themselves from an ancient foe.

Unlike many 80’s movies, the effects in Big Trouble in Little China are pretty good; the severed floating head that inhabits the underground lair of Lo Pan (James Hong) is very cool, and you can see that the effects come from some of the same team as Ghostbusters. And like Ivan Reitman’s classic, much of the humour comes from the casual way that the heroes react to the ridiculous situations they’re in; Jack Burton is an unusually accident-prone hero, and the way his bravado is regularly punctuated by pratfalls makes him an ancestor of the likes of Captain Jack Sparrow. Cattrall does well with her spunky heroine, and Dun also makes a big impression as the real hero of the story.

Perhaps Big Trouble in Little China was too smart for its own good; reversing the cultural assumptions by making Jack Burton a sidekick to Wang Chi seems to have confused audiences who expect the West to lead. But we’re hopefully a bit more sophisticated now, and the quirky Big Trouble in Little China rises to meet our elevated expectations; fast, chaotic and inventive, it’s yet another Carpenter film that really deserved more than it got from audiences at the time.