REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (23)

By: Micah Nathan
June 14, 2024

One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of “offbeat” movies from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Josh Glenn.

BIG TROUBLE IN LITTLE CHINA | JOHN CARPENTER | 1986

There’s a Schrödinger’s cat thing going on when trying to write about John Carpenter’s gloriously dumb Big Trouble in Little China — essayistic discussion of the movie changes the movie into something not worth analyzing, much less watching, much less recommending even as an enjoyable failure. So in that sense I’m ruining the fun even as I insist you watch Big Trouble in Little China for its fun.

I get nervous when revisiting the stuff I loved as a kid, because it rarely looks as good as I remembered and some of the actors are now dead, which makes me sad. But BTILC is different. I didn’t fully appreciate this until re-watching in preparation for this essay. I remembered all the easy stuff: Kurt Russell’s (purposely) terrible John Wayne impression; Kim Cattrall’s (flawed, charming) Rosalind Russell-inspired performance; the wuxia influence; the anamorphic format; the floating eye-creature; the “Three Storms” henchmen; the alleyway kung-fu brawl; the neon escalator’s (flawed, charming) suburban mall-inspired performance; the bunch-of-dudes-stoned-in-an-elevator scene; and of course the part where Kurt Russell knocks himself out before the big fight.

That’s a lot. There’s a lot of a lot going on in BTILC and all of it works, which is to say none of it is boring. The greatest sin for any movie is being boring.

Most critics trashed BTILC, including James Berardinelli whose main gripe was that “the story never tries hard to be even a little convincing.” Please note he’s reviewing a movie called Big Trouble in Little China. Please note this is the plot: Swaggering, idiotic truck driver Jack Burton (Kurt Russell) helps his best friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) rescue Wang’s fiancée from the evil sorcerer Lo Pan (James Hong) headquartered under San Francisco’s Chinatown. Kim Cattrall plays Gracie Law, a plucky lawyer investigating the disappearance of her friend who was also kidnapped by the evil sorcerer. The evil sorcerer kidnaps these women in his search for a “girl with green eyes” who presumably has to be Asian, in order to marry them and sacrifice them so he can become a young man again, blah blah, whatever and who cares. Let’s get to the kung-fu battles and magic bolts and monsters and damsels-in-distress and the good guys drinking trippy homebrew made by good guy sorcerer Egg Shen (Victor Wong) which leads to that terrific bunch-of-dudes-stoned-in-an-elevator scene.

Carpenter does get to all of it. He doesn’t bother with trying to make any of it seem real. He keeps it moving, he keeps it playful, he keeps it not-boring. The movie is fun. My physics might be wrong with the Schrödinger’s cat analogy but my opinion is right. Now forget this essay ever happened.

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REPO YOUR ENTHUSIASM (23)

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