I’m not sure comedy is even allowed in the Hellmouth these days. But we definitely didn’t know how good we had it in the 80s when great movies like Big Trouble in Little China were considered third-tier releases.
The brilliance of the movie is that it never tells Jack Burton he isn’t the hero.
That’s important because lesser versions of this script would have turned him into a joke. They would have had the universe stop every five minutes so the audience could be directed to point and laugh at the dumb white trucker stumbling through Chinatown. But Big Trouble in Little China doesn’t do that. Carpenter clearly likes Jack too much for that.
Jack is not incompetent because he’s stupid or cowardly. He’s incompetent because he has accidentally wandered into a world with a completely different operating system than the one he understands. He thinks he’s in a Seventies trucker action movie. Wang Chi knows they’re in a Hong Kong supernatural fantasy.
And the movie never breaks character on either side of that divide.
Jack keeps behaving exactly like the protagonist of a Kurt Russell action picture. He makes big speeches over the CB radio. He kicks doors open. He charges into danger with absolute confidence. The problem is that his confidence has almost no relationship with reality.
This is one of the few movies, like the first two Godfathers and the first Hangover, that I’ll find myself still watching 15 minutes after flipping past it. If you haven’t seen it, you should really give it a shot. Just don’t take it anymore seriously than it takes itself.