An offensively bad ride through the toy store. In the happy, garish '80s you could get away with a lot in the movies. "Big Trouble in Little China" does indeed all it can to do just that. The result is a tiresome, juvenile joyride through the toy store
minus the joy.
Kurt Russell plays smug truck driver Jack Burton, who makes a stop in San Francisco's Chinatown to visit his friend Wang. Accompanied by Jack, Wang goes to meet his childhood sweetheart at the airport, only to see her get abducted by Chinese gangsters. The hunt for her leads to a gang war, which in turn leads to a showdown in the underworld of Chinese black magic, mythical reincarnation curses and various Kung Fu fights. Oh, did I forget to mention drooling fur monsters in corridors, hovering spy brains with faces and characters named Lo Pan and Egg Shen?
Filmmaker John Carpenter (a hero from my youth!) was at his best doing low-budget horror or thrillers. That made him both interesting, creative, and sometimes a master of creating tension and atmosphere - especially with its own scripts. He is not the writer here, and doing action comedy on a large, noisy scale with various supernatural ingredients thrown into the wok, is just not his thing. With a big monetary budget bag in his hand, he becomes a boisterous nine-year-old running through the toy store, buying one colorful balloon and Chinese firecracker after another – only to pop and shoot them off inside the store, while cheering. Continuously. It's sad to see an old hero making a fool of himself like that.
I try to set my mind into harmless, playful entertainment-mode. But this is so cheaply written, deftless, desperate and dumb that I only get dejected and tired. There is no balance, finesse or wow-factor in the action-, chase- or fight scenes. They just keep crashing into one another like an endless set-up of bowling pins. Sometimes the fur-monkey-monster pops up. There is a lot of running, stumbling and yelling in corridors plus a bit of diving in indoor pools. One of the bad guys has the inexplicable ability to inflate himself until he explodes (!). And perhaps most sadly: it's simply not funny, only embarrassingly low-brow. If one wanted to find a mitigating circumstance, one could pull up the Tongue-in-Cheek-excuse or The Huge Campy- card. But for that to work, it takes smartness in the comic material. Here, I laugh once. And that's in a sigh saying: "What IS this mess?!"
Alternately, it's like watching an extended Scooby Doo cartoon on speed (I'm tempted to write Chinese opium but that's more of a downer) with about the same amount of character development. In any case, this is offensively bad. Or maybe it IS made for nine-year-olds watching Scooby Doo? Nope, as it probably has one too many a knife in the head/broken elbow for that target group.
Kurt Russell might be doing a pastiche of his previous tough guys Snake Plissken (Escape from New York) or MacReady (The Thing), but why not have a clear nod to those cult characters, like a black eye patch falling off, or something? His Jack Burton is just a charmless, impotent John Wayne-impersonator in cowboy boots who is not even given good lines. He drives a truck called "The Pork Chop Express" ... while chewing embarrassing clichés over his two-way radio. Kim Cattrall as the woman in distress/ love-interest is squeezed into the story so fast that there isn't a chance to buy the potentially mandatory romance even for a moment. Russell's unexpected final rejection is a bit liberating, though.
Is there anything good to be found? Well, we have very stylish set designs and pretty okay special effects. But what good is that, when we have a terrible script, cacophony-action and characters that I don't give two cents about? There is a nostalgic expression in the world of film: "They don't make 'em like They Used to". Sometimes that fact is very reassuring.
2 out of 10 from ozjeppe.