Big Trouble in Little China
First screened in December 2025
Director: John Carpenter. Cast: Kurt Russell, Dennis Dun, Kim Cattrall, James Hong, Victor Wong, Suzee Pai, Kate Burton, Donald Li, Carter Wong, Peter Kwong, James Pax, Jeff Imada, Chao Li Chi. Screenplay: Gary Goldman & David Z. Weinstein and W.D. Richter. In Brief:
Riskiest experiments too sloppy and half-hearted to land. Otherwise chaotic, imitative, and so racist.
VOR:②
There is something to be said for spending so much money so lavishly and committing to a truly berserk vision. But it's a small something.
And here's where John Carpenter and I agree to just see other people in perpetuity. The things I can respect in Big Trouble in Little China still don't appeal to me all that much. Carpenter certainly manages the non-stop momentum I had expected and mostly missed in Escape from New York, even if it sustains such antic levels here that the plot becomes a delirious, overworked nonsense and Escape's shadowy steadiness starts looking pretty good. I recognize the ambition in Carpenter's mixes of comedy, horror, adventure, and suspense, delivered in alternately grindhouse and kiddie-matinée tones. But if Starman felt like a Superman rehash powered at least as much by envy and hopeful career advancement as by fully thought-through creative integrity, Big Trouble bespeaks a similar relation to Raiders of the Lost Ark and Temple of Doom, with too little of their dexterity and power. The funny moment when Kurt Russell impulsively slashes a calligraphed hanging screen, right in line with Harrison Ford shooting that swordsman in the Cairo square, is almost too obvious a copy of something earlier and bolder—a problem this movie often has, even when it's merrily rolling. Russell's own oscillations between conjuring Ford and even more closely mimicking John Wayne suggest some agenda at pop homage and critical dialogue with white heroism and rapscallion masculinity in the annals of U.S. cinema. But Big Trouble is too anarchic and too juvenile in its own sensibility to fully support that kind of inquiry, no matter how many against-type, occasionally chuckle-worthy cutaways to Russell's Jack Burton being clueless, useless, and crude.
Lambast him all you want, dopey, reckless, self-impressed Jack is still positioned as Big Trouble's protagonist—and, from the very first scene, its mythic dedicatee—even though the screenplay would work better without him in it. The characters who in his absence would readily inherit center stage, including Dennis Dun's appealingly played Wang Chi (who comes across as a sidekick in his own story) and the vaguely Obi Wan-ish but plainly absurd Egg Shen ("Egg Shen"?), are clumsily mishandled by Carpenter, as I think is James Hong's Lo Pan, whom the film won't release into straightforward macabre (as Temple of Doom does with Mola Ram, for better or worse) but also doesn't capably frame as a plummy seriocomic villain (like a Fu Manchu equivalent to Die Hard's Hans Gruber).
And these are the best examples of how Big Trouble fares with its multitudinous Asian characters, archetypes, and idioms, who constitute a florid parade of martial-arts clichés, subterranean sorcerers, leering sexual predators, and Orientalized Keystone Kops. Off-putting and depersonalized on their own, they are also routinely conflated with the non-human monsters with whom they keep company, such that I found Big Trouble pretty impossible to enjoy. Imagine an entire film, maybe even an entire theme park, set entirely inside the prologue of Gremlins, or a best-of-bad-options professional nadir for the actor protagonists in Interior Chinatown. That said, my fatigued response to Big Trouble in Little China had just as much to do with the insensible screenplay, the further evidence of how tricky Kurt Russell is to direct even when he's game, and the triad of ridiculous women: Suzee Pai's mute object, Kate Burton's gratuitous bumbler, and Kim Cattrall's shrilly screwball idiot and intermittent, unpersuasive spitfire.
Future Donnie Darko and Southland Tales costume designer April Ferry and whoever designed the very Jabba's Palace repertoire of creatures (which might have worked better in a film that had any reason for their existing) strike the most credible balances for me between the movie's tonal and visual ambitions and its disappointing, often pea-brained fulfillment of them. There's a loopy zaniness in these areas of the movie that bespeak some personality, and some real creativity. I imagine many of the movie's numerous fans would grant similar immunity to makeup supervisor Ken Chase, in his third and final Carpenter collaboration, and to John J. Lloyd's production design. Both have their moments but generally impressed me a little less, and they're harder to disentangle from the broader National Lampoon's Orientalist Purgatory concept. (Lloyd made this movie about halfway between designing The Thing and The Naked Gun, which tells you much of what you need to know about Big Trouble in Little China as a whole. The script was co-authored by the scribes of Total Recall and Home for the Holidays, which fills in even more of this devotedly addled picture.)
Maybe I'm taking too long to issue the kind of verdict that Chris Feil put across much more economically about another Carpenter film. And it's true that Big Trouble in Little China exhausted and exasperated me enough that it quickly buried my own memories of what I enjoyed in the early going: a public-streets showdown between magically advanced karate masters, an airport kidnapping in plain view that Carpenter makes interesting but Brian De Palma would have nailed. I do think it's a problem that Big Trouble's relative highs often imply the grander peaks they might have become in different hands. But if all of the above boils down to a taste reaction, I'm cool with that. I can politely decline a dish that doesn't appeal to me, and can show myself out of the whole Carpenter Cafeteria from now on, leaving it to the folks who groove better to its admirably adventurous but chaotically uneven cuisine. Grade:C–
(I originally wrote this capsule on Letterboxd, where you can comment if you like.)
