Craig J. Clark
For reasons too convoluted to get into, it falls to truck driver Jack Burton to pose as a client of the White Tiger, a San Francisco brothel that specializes in young women “fresh off the boat.” In order to be conspicuously inconspicuous, Jack dons a brown suit and horn-rimmed glasses to become “Henry Swanson,” whose smooth patter with the madam includes his assertion that “excitement’s my game.” An actor has to be secure in themselves to appear as foolish as Kurt Russell allows himself to be in this and other scenes in 1986’s Big Trouble in Little China, but it helps that it was his fourth film with director John Carpenter, a close collaboration that stretched back to the 1979 TV movie Elvis.
For their next act, 1981’s Escape from New York, Russell’s portrayal of taciturn antihero Snake Plissken took more than a few pages out of Clint Eastwood’s playbook, and he further burnished his tough guy image as helicopter pilot MacReady in Carpenter’s 1982 remake of The Thing. By the time Big Trouble came along, he was ready to subvert that image, with Carpenter’s approval. For as much as Jack carries himself with John Wayne swagger, he’s out of his depth from the moment he rolls into Chinatown, and alternates between getting knocked on his ass and playing catch-up.
This makes Jack the ideal audience surrogate, as Carpenter and company – including visual effects wizard Richard Edlund, cinematographer Dean Cundey, and screenwriter W.D. Richter – plunge the audience headlong into a wild adventure chock full of magic, monsters, and martial artistry. It’s no wonder Jack needs constant hand-holding as he’s thrust from one outrageous scenario to another and introduced to a dizzying array of characters. The one that gets his dander up the most – and into the biggest trouble – is immortal wizard Lo Pan (James Hong), who appears in three different guises to further confuse matters. To defeat him, Jack needs all the help and allies he can muster.
That’s where the real hero comes in. While Russell is undeniably the star, Dennis Dun’s Wang Chi is the character who moves the plot, since his fiancée Miao Yin is the girl in need of rescuing from Lo Pan, who is interested in her because she has green eyes. If anything, Jack is the sidekick as Wang ventures into Lo Pan’s domain to rescue Miao Yin, showing off his fighting skills in the process. The difference between them is while Wang is fighting for the love of his life, Jack mostly wants his truck, the Pork-Chop Express, back.
Also in their corner are troublemaking attorney Gracie Law (Kim Cattrall), whose zippy repartee with Jack wouldn’t be out of place in a romantic comedy, and tour guide Egg Shen (Victor Wong), who has a few magic tricks up his sleeves – and in his Six Demon Bag. Aligned against our heroes are Lo Pan’s bodyguards, the Storms, who up the supernatural quotient. In all, it may have been a big ask for US audiences and critics when it was released 40 years ago this week – just in time for the 4th of July – but Big Trouble’s failure at the box office has since been overridden by the hordes of fans who found it on cable and home video, making it the beloved cult classic it is today.
Much of the credit for that is down to how re-watchable it is (a boon to those trying to untangle its fast-moving plot) and how quotable. In addition to “It’s all in the reflexes,” which comes up at the beginning and gets called back at the end, Richter’s script comes equipped with a seemingly endless supply of great lines. “Son of a bitch must pay.” “The Chinese have a lot of hells.” “May the wings of liberty never lose a feather.” Then there’s what Jack says when he and Wang are about to head into the proverbial lion’s den: “You people sit tight, hold the fort, and keep the home fires burning. And if we’re not back by dawn, call the president.” Russell delivers the line with such conviction, you’d almost think the president would answer.
What’s most endearing about Big Trouble, though, is how fallible Jack turns out to be, in spite of his macho posturing. Witness the ungainly way he falls into a water tank when Gracie bumps into him. Or how he knocks himself out by firing a gun into the ceiling. Or when he kills a guard wearing heavy leather armor and gets stuck underneath him. Or how he has Gracie’s lipstick smeared across his lips during his climactic showdown with Lo Pan. If he knew how ridiculous he looked, he might have been a little self-conscious, but that’s not the Jack Burton way. With him, the check is always in the mail.
Those with green eyes and without can behold “Big Trouble in Little China” on Tubi.
