Vintage

In the build-up to Big Trouble in Little China’s release in 1986, posters advertising the film’s impending release should have had a warning scroll emblazoned across the top of all promotional posters, reading:

WARNING: Viewer must be willing to suspend disbelief for 99 minutes in order to watch this film.

Unfortunately, those responsible for promoting John Carpenter’s cult masterpiece shied away from this course of action and Big Trouble initially flopped.

Initially, however, is the key word as Big Trouble, once reaching video and television, found it’s audience.  As time has worked on this film, similar to many a Carpenter vehicle, like a fine wine, it is now regarded as a gleeful, genre-mashing gobbledygook of action, satire, and Asian mysticism wrapped in the guise of a B-Movie train wreck.

The story begins, innocently enough, following cock-sure trucker Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) as he puts a beating on Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) during a late night game of poker in Chinatown.  As the game ends, Burton takes “Wang” to reunite with his long, lost love Miao Yin (Suzee Pai) so Burton can make sure he collects his considerable winnings.

Here, Jack, Wang, and the aptly named attorney Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall) are helpless to prevent the kidnapping of Miao Yin at the hands of the Lords of Death, a Chinatown gang.

What our heroes don’t know is that the Lords of Death are working for an ancient sorcerer named David Lo-Pan (James Hong) so that he may find a girl with green eyes to be sacrificed, putting an end to a centuries long curse on the villain.

The problem with putting together a synopsis for the plot of this movie is that there are so many abrupt twists and turns that you are prone to leave something out, or reveal too much.  The writers decided to throw so much into one film that it’s difficult totally grasping what’s going on the first time through. 

In an approximately five minute span, you go from an airport in San Francisco to a back alley battle in Chinatown where rival gangs and mystical bad guys are involved in a deftly choreographed fight to the death.

This happens while the hero, and the viewer, have virtually no idea of what is going on and are totally failing to grasp the initial gravity of the situation.  Burton walks in as though he were the cavalry arriving to the rescue, a modern day cowboy, new in town and ready to put the bad guys out of business.

As the film progresses, we begin to realize that Burton is way over his head in all of this “end of the world” business.  He is the hero, but at the same time, he isn’t.  Without the backup of the determined ’Wang’ and a cadre of other heroes,  Jack wouldn’t know which way was up in the dangerous underground of Chinatown.

And that is where the viewer differentiates from Burton, who never loses his over-the-top machismo throughout the proceedings.  When I initially saw this film as a child, I never realized how out of his element Burton was.  The character is so assured through the proceedings that you’re just as confident he’ll conquer all of this as he is.

Kurt Russell does a great job of channeling the hammiest John Wayne he could muster in order to accomplish this.  The script gives Burton a wealth of one liners and ridiculous exchanges for Russell to do work and the film delivers some lines that will remain with you for the rest of your life.
   
Much like the lead, most of the supporting characters in the film are played to the maximum level of tongue-in-cheek.  James Hong’s David Lo Pan hisses out lines with the arrogance and disdain you would expect of a man carrying the weight of a curse for two centuries.  His performance is exaggerated, to be sure, but that’s in the fun of this film.

It’s impossible to give Big Trouble in Little China a perfect score… and that’s why it’s the perfect movie for it‘s intentions.  There are flaws, to be sure, but I find no need to really go into them.  The movie comes out of the chutes knowing that, once the film is done, most viewers will be scratching their head in confusion.  The movie may take a few views to fully appreciate, but that’s fine.

It’s what makes Big Trouble priceless and timeless: the incredible ability to watch and re-watch it without the movie feeling stale or trite.

Stephen Catanese is a writer living in Pittsburgh