Remembering Al Leong

If I told you there was one actor who had appeared in movies alongside a veritable Mount Rushmore of action movie stars -- Bruce Willis, Mel Gibson, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Keanu Reeves -- you'd say "That's impossible, such a person does not exist."

And yet you'd be wrong, because Al Leong does exist.

Yes that's in the present tense. Al Leong is still alive. I'm sorry if my title for this post gave you the opposite impression, especially coming directly after a genuine "in memoriam" piece yesterday.

But I doubt I'll hear it when the now 70-year-old former actor and stuntman does die, because his name is not going to make it to the top of the list for celebrity death notices. I reckon most people have never heard of him.

Well, my high school friends and I are not "most people." And that's really what I'm remembering today, two days after seeing him pop up in Big Trouble in Little China on my second viewing of it.

Sometime around 1990, when my friends and I watched movies we'd rented from the local Videosmith every Friday or Saturday night, we began noticing this one distinctive stuntman/henchman appearing over, and over, and over again. We wouldn't have had IMDB at the time, obviously, so we eventually searched out his name in the credits: Al Leong.

Why so distinctive? Certainly there were plenty of Asian stuntmen in action movies at that time?

Actually, no -- there may have been Asian stuntmen in movies made in Asia, but if you were talking about Hollywood movies, there tended not to be as many. And then there was the fact that Leong's trademark long hair -- at the back of a heavily receding forehead, no less -- made him stand out, even if others of Asian descent might have appeared in the cast. He wore his hair that way, as well as his trademark beard and moustache, no matter what film he was in and no matter what it might have otherwise required of him. 

I guess we also thought there was something funny about him, and we weren't the only ones. He also appeared in comedies. It's here where I admit I cheated a little bit by saying he appeared alongside noted action star Keanu Reeves, because this was long before anyone saw Reeves that way. Yes, Leong appears in Bill & Ted's Excellent Adventure, possibly in his most prominent role ever, playing Genghis Khan.

Would you like a list of the other prominent movies from that era that featured Leong? It's pretty impressive.

Lethal Weapon
Action Jackson
Die Hard
They Live
Black Rain
Death Warrant
Hot Shots! Part Deux
The Last Action Hero
Beverly Hills Cop III
Escape from L.A.
Lethal Weapon 4
The Scorpion King

I'm going to assume he dies in Lethal Weapon, so I'm going to assume the continuity people weren't too worried about him popping back up in Lethal Weapon 4.

I suppose I could be reading the resume of any person who makes a career as a stuntman or henchman, but you'd never know it because you'd never notice those people. But how could you not notice Al Leong?

Here he is in Die Hard:

And here is in Death Warrant:

And here he is in Lethal Weapon:

And as Genghis Khan:

And because it was the movie I just rewatched, here he is in Big Trouble in Little China:

And though it turns out I've actually mentioned him twice on this blog before -- here and here -- I may not have had occasion to think about him since the second of those posts in 2015, even though I have of course seen Die Hard more recently than that. So that's another way I'm "remembering" him today, in addition to thinking fondly back on those high school Friday nights frittered away on dumb action movies.

Of course, even the friskiest and most unbreakable stuntman can't hang around forever, and by 2005 it was time for Leong to hang up his kicking shoes and fireproof jackets. He worked until he was 52, though, and that's pretty good for someone who basically has no acting ability. 

Someone did dust him off for the 2014 movie Awesome Asian Bad Guys, though, in which he plays, appropriately, "Al." I'm wondering if that's sort of like an Expendables, except for former Asian henchmen.

Maybe that needs to be next on my list.

Mistaking parody for incompetence

For the first half of my life, I thought Big Trouble in Little China must be about the worst movie ever made.

It's taken the most recent half for me to see it, an event that finally transpired on Saturday night. And I gotta say: Wow, what a movie.

I didn't realize movies had their tongues this firmly planted in their cheeks, this many years ago.

Of course they did -- parodies have existed for almost as long as movies have existed. But because I never realized that, my only conclusion was that this movie must have been an epic disaster.

In 1986, when John Carpenter's movie first came out, I saw a commercial for it that left quite an impression on me. It had to have been a commercial, because I doubt I would have been seeing a movie where they were playing it as a theatrical trailer. I was 12 going on 13, and it's actually most likely I saw an ad for it appearing on cable a year or two later.

My conclusion? It looked like an awful, terrible movie of the poorest possible quality.

I didn't get that that was the point.

See, I didn't understand irony back then, and only thought I understood parody. I'm sure I'd already seen Airplane! -- even though I would have technically been too young to see that one shot of the topless woman jiggling through the aisle -- but I don't think I could have explained to you what Airplane! was doing, or setting out to do. In any case, the absurdity in Airplane! was straightforward -- you couldn't miss it that this movie was not on the level.

With Big Trouble in Little China, the scenes they showed in the commercial would have seemed far subtler to me. I didn't get that just turning up the ridiculous factor in an otherwise straightforward scene meant that you were making it incredibly funny to people in the know. I just figured it was a sign of poor craftsmanship. It seemed to me like a massive tonal failure, a colossal misunderstanding of how human beings really behave.

In fact, probably until sometime in my 20s when people told me otherwise, I assumed that Big Trouble was some misbegotten cousin of either The Golden Child or Howard the Duck. I considered them to be dark, murky misfires of the same ilk, at least two of those three featuring a large Asian cast. I haven't actually seen Howard the Duck, but I saw enough imagery of it at the time that this movie reminded me of that one. It must have been the shoddy puppet creatures in Big Trouble. In fact, I had the oddest sense of deja vu on Saturday, when I saw the scene I remembered from the commercial, where that hairy creature with the gruesome face shambles through a tunnel carrying Kim Cattrall over his shoulder. It might have been that single moment that made me consider Big Trouble a sad, alienating movie I wanted nothing to do with.

Thanks, young Vance, for finally developing a sense of humor.

For anyone who hasn't seen it, Big Trouble in Little China is an absolute hoot. I'm not going to say it's a better movie than Airplane!, though I'm sure a lot of people would argue that. But I do think it gives its audience a ton of credit by not having to be quite so overt with its humor. Sure, the humor in Big Trouble is pretty over the top. But none of it involves total anachronisms and cutaways that immediately call attention to the fact that the whole thing is a joke. Big Trouble's humor is more a pastiche of absurd dialogue, toying with iconic character types and moments of gleeful special effects mayhem.

Shall I spoil a few moments to whet your appetite for a possible viewing? Okay, just a few.

- Playing Jack Burton, the incomparable Kurt Russell, in his third collaboration with Carpenter, has unwittingly driven his semi into a secluded alley in San Francisco's Chinatown, with his friend Wang Chi (Dennis Dun) riding shotgun. About a dozen heavily armed Chinese gangs appear on the scene and begin an extremely elaborate shootout. After about five minutes of them shooting at each other, we cut to Russell sitting in the cab of his semi, freaked out, holding a Bowie knife. Yep, a Bowie knife.

- Burton later gets a hold of a machine gun, but when he fires it, it fires in single blasts, like a shotgun. No explanation is ever given.

- Burton and Chi pretend to be members of the telephone company in order to break into a building to find a secret passage. To pull off this charade, Burton walks in confidently holding a single rotatory telephone in his hand. You know, the kind that looks like this. How that would help an actual phone company employee fix a phone problem in a building is anyone's guess.

- At one point in the movie, Burton tells a group of people "If we're not back in two hours, call the president." It is completely unclear what he means by this.

I'll stop there. Besides, Big Trouble in Little China is one of those movies where you laugh so much, but everything is so random, that you can't even remember half the things you laughed at when the movie is over.

Unfortunately, I was not the only person who didn't get what Big Trouble in Little China was supposed to be when it first came out. The film failed in a major way -- so much so that it disillusioned Carpenter about Hollywood and prompted him to focus on smaller, more independent-minded movies.

But not before he gave us They Live, which operates on a similar level to Big Trouble, two years later. That's one I've been trying to push on my wife for more than a year. Now that she laughed so hard and loved Big Trouble so much, maybe she's ready.

As for me? Maybe it's finally time to watch Howard the Duck from my Netflix instant queue.

Could it be that George Lucas' famous flop is also a brilliant parody being mistaken as incompetent?