Big Trouble In Little China (1986)

Originally Written

Tuesday , June 10, 2008

I like corny films as much as the next person, but there's a fine line between how much corn I can stomach and how much becomes too overwhelming to keep down. With the film Big Trouble In Little China, the corn is so over popped that it almost had me puking, giving me another reason to believe "cult classic" actually means "crap".

Kurt Russell plays a smart-alecky, know-it-all truck driver named Jack Burton who's about to discover there's a lot he really doesn't know. On a visit to San Francisco's Little China, Jack runs into an old friend named Wang Chi who will end up getting Jack into a load of trouble. Jack drives Wang to the airport to pick up his fiancée, a beautiful emerald eyed girl, who is quickly kidnapped by a group of thugs before Jack or Wang are able to stop them. As it turns out green eyed girls are quite rare in China, and they have a special importance to a sorcerer named Lo Pan, who hopes to regain his mortal body by marrying and sacrificing a woman with green eyes to his gods.

Rave reviews from what almost seems to be everyone, mixed with the fact that I really enjoy the action / adventure and science fictions films of the 80's, had me quite interested in this film. But that anticipation was quickly killed as I began watching what is possibly the corniest film I have seen since Batman: The Movie starring Adam West. If that level of camp is your forte, then by all means Big Trouble In Little China is the film for you, but there's only a certain level of corny I can take before a film becomes unbearably stupid. Surprisingly I made it through the entire film, but the story is so inconsistent, the acting is so horrible, and the script so bad that it overwhelms the film. At best it's the equivalent of a bad Saturday morning cartoon turned into a live action motion picture. The progression of the story seems to be made up as the characters go along and the script is so awful I found it hard to believe someone actually wrote it, let alone was paid to do so. I gave this film an honest shot, but it turned out to be something I would expect from a film starring Jackie Chan with horrible English dubbing, not from a film with such a large fan fair in a decade of great classic films.

3/10