Big Trouble in Little China (1986)
Carpenter hasn't done much directing in the last ten years, and what he did direct hasn't been great. For about a decade, though, from roughly 1979 to 1989, Carpenter was solid gold. Practically everything he directed was fantastic. Some of my favorite movies ever came from Carpenter's heyday -- 1978's Halloween, 1980's The Fog, 1982's The Thing (a much more faithful adaptation of its source material, John W. Campbell's "Who Goes There?", than the 1951 version), 1987's Prince of Darkness (a Lovecraftian horror story masquerading as religious horror), 1988's media satire They Live! -- just to name a few.
Big Trouble in Little China is probably his most insane movie. It's...well, let's call it an action-horror-fantasy-comedy. Trucker Jack Burton (Russell) shows up in L.A.'s Chinatown and gets in over his head when his friend Wang's girlfriend Mao Yin is kidnapped by the Lords of Death, a local gang. There's an underground turf war going on between multiple Chinatown gangs, but all that pales to the real threat -- David Lo Pan, an ancient Chinese sorcerer played by the incomparable James Hong, who pretty much steals the show. Whatever Lo Pan is, he's no longer human. He's an evil dream, or a magician who made a deal with a demon, or was cursed by a demon, or "a ghost playing at being a man," but he is, in his own words, "beyond your understanding." He's also intent on possessing Mao Yin, as a prophecy has said that if he marries a girl with green eyes, he can become mortal again, his soul no longer scattered across eternity.
Wang and Jack team up with lawyer Gracie Law, Wang's friend Eddie and bus driver Egg Shen (the late, great Victor Wong), who also happens to be Lo Pan's rival in sorcery. The crew descends into Chinatown's hidden subterranean depths, a labyrinth full of monsters, traps, magic and centuries-old evil. There's a gorilla monster, a Beholder from Dungeons & Dragons, a giant neon skull, Lo Pan's three henchmen Thunder (Hong Kong movie star Carter Wong, who I'd watched in a dozen Saturday-afternoon kung fu movies on WGTW-48 during my early teens), Lightning and Rain, and all sorts of other craziness that has to be seen to be believed.
"Oh my God, no, what is that, don't tell me!"
There are some mostly apocryphal stories that Big Trouble in Little China was originally meant to be a sequel to The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across the Eighth Dimension, and if I didn't know better I could believe it, because this movie is just as ridiculous and the dialogue is just as weird. It's a movie steeped in Eastern mysticism and Western bravado, and it could only have been made right smack in the middle of the '80s. Movies back then had their directors' fingerprints all over them. You could recognize a John Carpenter movie about two minutes in.
Which is partly why I'm wary, to say the least, of any attempt to remake it. It's relevant as a snapshot of '80s culture, and I have vivid memories of Chinatown actually being a lot like it is here when I was a kid (minus the cave-dwelling monsters), but a modern remake just seems like it would be sort of meaningless. Both cultures, American and Chinese, have moved on, independently and relative to one another. Potential racial insensitivity aside, what's the point of making this movie again?
"I'll have you both rolled off to the Hell Where People Are Skinned Alive,
it's that simple, understand?!"
Don't get me wrong, I have nothing against remakes on principle. Sometimes they offer a new perspective on the original, sometimes they let the director refine his or her own vision, as with Takashi Shimizu's American remake of Ju-On: The Grudge. Lately, however, it seems to me as if a lot of remakes are just missing the point. RoboCop did away with the original's sharp satire and over-the-top gore. Total Recall didn't even take place on Mars. If they ever remake Starship Troopers -- well, I hope they don't, enough people misunderstood that one the first time around. I haven't seen the new Poltergeist, but everyone seems to be saying the same thing: as with the rest, it's blandly inoffensive and essentially pointless. Like chewing cardboard for an hour and a half. It's as if producers know people liked these movies, but they never even think to imagine why people liked them.
The whole point of Big Trouble in Little China is fairly subversive for its time. A lot of movies had the all-American hero and the Asian sidekick, who tended to be played by a non-Asian actor, such as Joel Grey as Chiun in Remo Williams: The Adventure Begins (I love Joel Grey, but he is not the best casting choice for a wise Chinese mentor). Jack Burton thinks he's the hero of the story, and the audience is invited to believe this as well -- he's Kurt Russell, after all -- but Wang is the real protagonist, and it's Jack who's the bumbling comedy sidekick. When the final battle starts, he fires his machine gun in the air and ends up knocking himself out with a piece of the ceiling, and then he ends up spending most of it pinned down under a pile of guys who keep getting killed on top of him. I just can't see The Rock doing that.
"Oh sure, and sorcery!"
On the other hand, I like The Rock. I like him as an action star. I like him as a serious actor. I like him as a comedy actor. He seems like a cool guy in real life, and onscreen he has charisma to spare. He also says the original is one of his favorite movies. But I'm not sure anyone involved gets the whole thing about Jack being the sidekick who thinks he's awesome, but seems perpetually out of his depth with each new turn in the maze. Maybe they'll do the same thing here, and set him up as the star only to turn audience expectations on their heads.
I guess we'll see how it turns out, but in the meantime, check out the fantastic 1986 original, which will, I'm about 99.99% certain, be better than even a remake that does it justice.
Available On: Netflix, Amazon Prime.
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