Rush Hour 3 (2007)
Chris Tucker stars as Carter and Jackie Chan stars as Lee in "Rush Hour 3." It’s Tucker vs. Chan, Round 3
“Rush Hour 3,” the junky, clunky, grimly unfunny follow-up to the marginally better “Rush Hour 2” and the significantly finer “Rush Hour,” isn’t the worst movie of the summer. But it’s an enervating bummer nonetheless, largely because it shows so little respect for its two likable stars and its audience. Once again Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, playing seriously unlikely detectives, bumble and slog through muddled setups, graceless action, crude jokes and even cruder stereotypes, sacrificing themselves on the altar of the director Brett Ratner’s vulgar success.
The arc of Mr. Ratner’s career can be summed up entirely with numbers, namely the $247,538,093 that “Rush Hour” raked into theaters worldwide; the $328,883,178 that “Rush Hour 2” made across the globe; and the mind-boggling (especially if you saw the movie) $453,796,824 earned, again worldwide, by “X-Men: The Last Stand.” These figures, from Variety, don’t include DVD revenue, cable sales and the like, but you get the big tautological picture: Mr. Ratner has a gift for making products that companies can sell to the public, which is why he makes products. Even so, given the anonymity of these products, the possessory credit “A Brett Ratner Film” seems largely ceremonial, even nostalgic, not to mention hubristic.
There’s nothing new about any of this, yet it does bear repeating every so often, even in a movie review. Like a lot of big-ticket productions “Rush Hour 3” will flood into theaters this weekend (gobbling up more than 3,700 of the nation’s approximately 38,000 screens) and, because of its ubiquity and its brawny advertising muscle, will pull in a sizable chunk of change. Bad reviews won’t make a lick of difference to its box office, though franchise fatigue might. Mr. Chan’s and Mr. Tucker’s star power has waned in the six years since “Rush Hour 2” (their bodies have noticeably slowed), and that might hurt, as will “The Bourne Ultimatum,” which opened last weekend and delivers far more action bang along with real filmmaking.
Part of the reason I’ve strayed from discussing “Rush Hour 3” is that there’s not much to say about the actual movie. It’s a generically crummy action flick. It’s ugly. It’s noisy. It’s stupid. And unlike, say, “Transformers,” which sells militarism alongside children’s toys, it doesn’t raise hackles, much less blood pressure. Thus, as an object, “Rush Hour 3” offers precious little of interest, although it does take a special kind of talent to make Paris, where some of the story takes place, look this uninviting. There, rather depressingly, Roman Polanski shows up wearing a mustache and a smirk to harass Mr. Chan’s and Mr. Tucker’s characters, who are globetrotting after some villains. Max von Sydow also pops up for a few scenes, a reminder that Ingmar Bergman really is dead.
Mr. Chan and Mr. Tucker don’t get to wiggle off the hook entirely. But people have to make a living, even movie stars, and there are limited opportunities for an aging Hong Kong martial-arts giant and an eccentrically talented black comic actor. Given how much pleasure both have provided over the years, especially Mr. Chan, here’s hoping they were paid by the truckload. Mind you, it would be nice if they could find mainstream projects that didn’t insist that the only way an Asian man and an African-American man can hold the screen together is if they engage in mutual abasement and self-humiliation. It would be nicer still if Mr. Chan didn’t have to play the sexual neuter and Mr. Tucker stopped popping his eyeballs.
“Rush Hour 3” is rated PG-13 (Parents strongly cautioned). It has racist stereotypes, mild violence and partly naked women.
RUSH HOUR 3
Opens today nationwide.
Directed by Brett Ratner; written by Jeff Nathanson, based on characters created by Ross LaManna; director of photography, J. Michael Muro; edited by Don Zimmerman, Dean Zimmerman and Mark Helfrich; music by Lalo Schifrin; production designer, Edward Verreaux; produced by Arthur Sarkissian, Roger Birnbaum, Jay Stern, Jonathan Glickman and Andrew Z. Davis; released by New Line Cinema. Running time: 90 minutes.
WITH: Chris Tucker (Carter), Jackie Chan (Lee), Hiroyuki Sanada (Kenji), Youki Kudoh (Jasmine), Max von Sydow (Reynard), Yvan Attal (George), Noémie Lenoir (Genevieve), Jingchu Zhang (Soo Yung) and Roman Polanski (Detective Revi).
