Someone gave me a copy of “Big Trouble in Little China“. I remember watching it when our family got our first VCR and as far as I could remember I liked the film. I was wondering what would be my reactions now.
Directed by: John Carpenter
Genres: Action, Fantasy, Adventure, Comedy
Cast: Kurt Russell, Kim Cattrall, Dennis Dun, James Hong, Victor Wong, Kate Burton, Donald Li, Carter Wong, Peter Kwong, James Pax, Suzee Pai, Chao Li Chi, Jeff Imada, Rummel Mor, Craig Ng
IMDB raintg: 6.7
My rating: 5.0 [rate 5.0]
Well, the film itself is pretty average. It has a good story that brings ancient Chinese mythology and martial arts into modern United States. The result is a good mix of action, mystery and humor.
The weak sides of the film are acting and dialogues. Actually, I think dialogues are to blame. They are so unnatural and artificial that anyone would have a problem performing them. But acting sucked too. Those few scenes which were natural were delivered very unconvincingly by most of the actors. Kurt Russel was trying though and did a better job than anyone. I also liked two Chinese guys out of the whole crowd. The first one was Victor Wong who played Uncle Egg. I’ve seen him in several movies and he is good everywhere. He has this charm that allows him to mix the look of old and poor with the goodness of the character. The second one was James Hong who played the main bad guy Lo Pan. Hong is a great actor and the one who contributed to a long list of movies (about 150 of them only as an actor).
On the good side, I was surprised by the quality of some special effects. Not all of them, but some. For example, that flying head with lots of eyes looked pretty cool even by today’s standards.
Overall the film was good, minus the dialogues and the acting. If you don’t mind these things much, than watch it – you’ll enjoy it. Otherwise, skip to something else.