I am OK with coming back to this thread every four years or so to talk about how great this movie is.
So FYI, my son (who is now less than a month away from 11) did see Big Trouble and he loved it. My daughter (16) has not. I explained the movie to The Boy by explaining that it’s got kung fu, wizards, and the guy thinks he’s the hero but he’s really the goofy sidekick. I think that may have helped explain the movie but I don’t know if that was even needed because he liked it anyway.
Amusingly enough, I have seen this movie so many times over the years and never realized that Jack was never intended to be the hero even if he is the POV character until I read about it on SDMB.
Sadly, this is not streaming on Netflix right now.
Well…he definitely is the protagonist. He is the leading character in the film and the movie is about his experience. So the film is about him.
It’s just that he is not the leading character in the story. The story is about the hero Wang rescuing his beloved. Russell is the comic relief sidekick who just thinks everything is about him because he is an overconfident egotist. The only time Carpenter missteps in this is in the mistake of having Russell kill the main bad guy without Wang even being present in the scene, which gives the impression he is the hero. IMHO Carpenter kinda muffs his own theme( and he has explicitly laid out that theme in his audio commentary on the film )at the end.
But right up until that, it plays out pretty brilliantly. It really is kind of a clever way to approach a film of this type.
To be fair, those people have a lot of hells.