This is one film that I did watch long ago but I barely have any memories of it. By now this is a cult classic but as is so often the case was a commercial failure on its release. It is best characterized as John Carpenter attempting to make a 1980s style wacky Hong Kong movie. My favorite part about it however is that it draws heavily on Chinese folklore but manages to more or less respect the source inspiration, casts a white man as the hero but doesn’t elevate him above his Chinese co-stars, making it a woke film that is far ahead of its time.

Truck driver Jack Burton regularly makes deliveries to Chinatown in San Francisco. One evening he wins money betting with his friend Wang Chi and before he can get his money, he has to accompany him on some errands including meeting Wang’s fiancée Miao Yin arriving from China at the airport. However her American friend Gracie Law is also there along with a Chinese gang who kidnaps her. Jack and Wang follow the gang to Chinatown in his truck where they witness two Chinese gangs fight and the intervention of three elite warriors with magic powers. A weird elderly Chinese sorcerer also appears and is seemingly unhurt after Jack runs over him with his truck. As they flee, leaving behind Jack’s truck, they learn that the sorcerer is Lo Pan, a cursed ancient being who needs to marry a girl with green eyes to remove his curse. Miao Yin happens to have green eyes but so does Gracie and they have to infiltrate the brothel where they believe Miao Yin is being held with the help of some friends.

Pretty much the only memory I have from watching this long ago is Jack and Wang turning the truck into small alleyway and suddenly finding themselves in a completely different world that runs according to different rules. This is still the case rewatching it now and it’s amazing how this is still America and yet not, with the toughs flexing Chinese kung fu on the streets and yet also pulling out submachineguns and shotguns. Everything is played up for comedy value with cheesy special effects that would be familiar to those who grew up with the wacky Hong Kong movies of the 1980s, complete with an exaggerated amount of posturing before they actually fight. I wouldn’t call this an effective action movie as it’s too silly and the plot is all over the place but I did enjoy this a great deal because of the nostalgia value of this kind of movie and the incongruence of seeing all these elements in an American movie.

But another reason why it works even now is that it ought to feel like an offensive movie by modern standards but it doesn’t. Jack expresses disbelief at the fantastical things he sees but never actually insults Chinese culture. The Cantonese used here is also mostly correct and intelligible which is more than can be said for a lot of more modern Hollywood movies. He struts around in a ridiculous wife beater tank top and talks big but if you pay attention he is actually rather ineffective and Wang does most of the fighting. The film inverts the usual trope in which the minority or woman partner acts as support or comic relief to the white male hero. Here Jack may stand front and center but he is really the mascot and the distraction while the rest of the team gets the job done. Both Kurt Russell and John Carpenter deliberately aimed for this effect but it seems that the studio didn’t understand the point and perhaps this was too far ahead of its time for movie audiences as well who thought that this would be a more conventional action movie.

Still this film does rather rely on the audience having some nostalgic love for old Hong Kong movies and even if it gives the female characters some personality, they are just here as damsels in distress. Its martial arts choreography is too silly to be actually exciting and Carpenter’s love of weird and random monster appearances is just so out of place. So this is a film with very niche appeal and is in no way high art. So I do enjoy it quite a lot myself and I love that something like this was made in the 1980s.