Big Trouble in Little China
May 30, 1986 in theaters
Truck driver Jack Burton gets pulled into a supernatural underworld beneath San Francisco's Chinatown when his friend's fiancee is kidnapped by a 2,000-year-old sorcerer. John Carpenter's 1986 genre mashup blends martial arts, Hong Kong fantasy, horror comedy, and an action hero who is confidently, heroically out of his depth.
Cast
Director
TRAILER
QUOTE
"It's all in the reflexes."
DID YOU KNOW?
Dennis Dun, who plays the actual hero Wang Chi, has noted in interviews that the film's joke is that Jack Burton is the sidekick who thinks he's the hero.
THE VERDICT
Synthesized from published reviews
Big Trouble in Little China is a film that understood its joke from the first frame — Jack Burton is not the hero, he just thinks he is, and Kurt Russell plays the oblivious bravado with complete conviction. John Carpenter built a love letter to Hong Kong genre cinema around an American protagonist who mostly gets in the way while the real heroes solve everything, and that inversion gives the film a comic energy most action comedies don't attempt. The mythology is dense, the creature design is extraordinary, and the film moves too fast to let any of it get over-explained. One of the most purely fun films in the OTHERverse catalog.
GALLERY
VIDEOS
