Big Trouble in Little China (1986)

John Carpenter's Big Trouble in Little China remains a curious artifact from 1986, a studio action-comedy rushed into production to beat The Golden Child to theaters and then flattened at the box office. Its reputation has since grown, and so has the temptation to read it as a model of inclusive casting. The casting is genuinely notable. Dennis Dun, James Hong, and Victor Wong occupy major roles, and Carpenter hired a casting director who represented Asian-American actors while meeting with community leaders before shooting. The film also inverts the usual arrangement: Kurt Russell's Jack Burton believes he is the hero, but Wang Chi is the capable one. That inversion is the movie's sharpest cultural move.

This is not, however, a piece of sustained social argument. Kim Cattrall's Gracie Law gets to call herself the brains to Jack's brawn, and Cattrall resisted the damsel framing, but the feminist texture is light and incidental. The engagement with Chinatown, Chinese mythology, and the Tong Wars has more care than most 1980s Hollywood fantasies, yet the result still trades in exotic mysticism, a green-eyed sacrifice, and a subterranean sorcerer. It is a fantasy of the East filtered through a white screenwriter's research and a white director's affection for Hong Kong cinema. No LGBTQ themes, no climate concerns, no anti-capitalist anger, no body-positivity message, no neurodivergence, and no revisionist history appear. The film simply has other business.

That business is comedy, mayhem, and a truck. The movie never pauses to instruct. There is no sermon, no moral checklist, no moment where a character turns to the camera to explain what we should think. Its progressive gestures are embedded in casting and structure, which makes them easier to enjoy and harder to applaud. The result is a lively, dated, and oddly generous piece of pop entertainment. It earns a measure of cultural credit without ever pretending to be a lesson.