The '80s Fantasy Movie Everyone Wrote Off That Became A Classic

By the 1980s, Kurt Russell had fully graduated from his Disney child star days into the makings of a cinematic icon. He'd already played Snake Plissken in John Carpenter's incredible 1981 sci-fi flick "Escape From New York," and he and the writer/director quickly reunited for the all-time classic "The Thing" a year later. Russell had five of his biggest box office flops in five years starting with "The Thing," however, and his and Carpenter's next project after that was arguably their most notorious bomb of all: the downright zany fantasy film "Big Trouble in Little China."

Critics didn't care much for the flick (Roger Ebert wrote, "This movie is straight out of the era of Charlie Chan and Fu Manchu, with no apologies and all of the usual stereotypes"), and audiences didn't like it, either. (It only made $11 million at the box office on a reported budget of $25 million.) But somehow, in a move that would make its protagonist proud, "Big Trouble in Little China" has since become a classic.

Russell does his best John Wayne impression in the film as big-rig driver Jack Burton, a wise-cracking hunk who serves as a parody of macho movie heroes. Indeed, Burton is undermined at every turn, proven wrong on a regular basis, and is generally upstaged by his new friend Wang (Dennis Dun), who Jack surely sees as his sidekick even when it's pretty clear the situation is actually reversed.

A plot recap would do the movie no favors, but suffice it to say that Kurt Russell is totally in on the joke here — it's just that audiences were so flummoxed by "Big Trouble in Little China" that the few people who did see it didn't know what to make of it. I admit I was one of them, at first: My initial viewing of this movie was spent in utter disbelief at what I was seeing. The ambitious combination of Western, martial arts, comedy, action, horror, and buddy picture tropes left me scratching my head, and some of the imagery is so ridiculous that it'll make you wonder how many hard drugs might have been involved in writing, greenlighting, and producing this sucker.

But that unusual mixture of genres, filtered through John Carpenter's very specific filmmaking sensibilities, results in a movie that is genuinely unlike anything else you'll ever see. It has shades of the similarly delirious "The Adventures of Buckaroo Banzai Across The 8th Dimension," an absurd 1984 sci-fi action adventure film starring Peter Weller, John Lithgow, and Jeff Goldblum. I suppose a case could be made that a more modern comp for the "kitchen sink" approach this movie takes might be something like the Best Picture Oscar-winning "Everything Everywhere All At Once," although that film is far more thematically and narratively coherent than this. 

"Big Trouble in Little China" is very much its own flavor of bizarre — and not always in a good way. But it's one hell of a swing, and in that era of swaggering cinematic tough guys, it's fun to see one be treated like an utter clown. Like "Buckaroo Banzai," this is worth watching as proof that Hollywood was absolutely wild in the '80s.