This is another collaboration between actor Kurt Russell (“Stargate”) and director John Carpenter (“Halloween”) along with “Escape From New York” and the remake of “The Thing”, it falls somewhere in the middle of those two.

In “Big Trouble In Little China”, Kurt Russell stars as a satire of his macho roles by playing burly but useless American trucker Jack Burton; he finds himself dragged into an ancient Chinese mystical battle with an evil being known as Lo Pan (James Hong “Blade Runner”). It sounds excellent on paper but they make a meal out of explaining the story as they heavily overcomplicated something very simplistic and all-round it just could have been a lot better than it really was.

I really like the performance from Kurt Russell and his character as they are very similar to Bruce Campbell’s Ash in “Army Of Darkness” (a funnier monster satire). He gets some good lines here and is by far the best thing in it. The villains could have been a lot more amusing than they are. I do like the look of the various strange creatures throughout the movie but we don’t see anywhere near enough of them. The other characters really are bad as they rant and rave about the plot and make it seem very deep but then confess to not actually knowing what is going on.

“Big Trouble in Little China” has an interesting visual style and it is also interesting to see Carpenter and Russell mock their previous efforts but it just isn’t as spectacular as it easily could have been. I liked “Escape From New York” as Carpenter created a captivating world for a tough Kurt Russell to explore but although this one tries, it just doesn’t succeed. There’s too much meaningless talking happening in this film and too much confusion surrounding the story for it to work.