What 1986 action-comedy stars Kurt Russell as a truck driver fighting sorcery in San Francisco?

The 1986 action-comedy starring Kurt Russell as a truck driver battling sorcery in San Francisco is Big Trouble in Little China. Russell plays Jack Burton, a swaggering but often outmatched trucker who becomes involved in his friend Wang Chi’s effort to rescue his fiancée from kidnappers in Chinatown.

Directed by John Carpenter, the film combines martial-arts spectacle, Chinese mythology, supernatural villains, slapstick comedy, and classic adventure-movie bravado. Its main antagonist is David Lo Pan, an ancient sorcerer who needs a green-eyed woman to break a curse and regain his physical form.

The film is sometimes mistaken for Carpenter’s darker science-fiction movies The Thing or They Live, both of which also star Kurt Russell. Unlike those films, Big Trouble in Little China deliberately plays its action straight while making Jack Burton’s inflated self-confidence part of the joke. It opened in July 1986 but underperformed commercially before gaining a devoted cult following through home video and television.