Rush Hour 3 (2007)

The jokes are not as funny. The action, heavily propped up by wires and doubling, is less exciting. The plot is thinner than ever. Possibly for the first time in his career, Jackie Chan looks genuinely tired and disinterested onscreen. Chris Tucker is loud and obnoxious as usual but no longer in a mildly amusing fashion. The direction of Brett Ratner is lazy and bland. This sums up the third and hopefully last RUSH HOUR movie which is about as fun as actually sitting through rush hour traffic.

Little effort has ever been made to give Chan a real Hollywood script to work with. His films in the U.S. have always just been vehicles to carry a fading measure of what was once one of the most entertaining and talented physical comedians and martial arts stars rolled into one. RUSH HOUR 3 takes this sorry trend to new lows.

With flimsy justification, Detective Carter (Tucker) and Inspector Lee (Chan) team up three years after their previous exploits to investigate the assassination of a Chinese official who was about to pull the veil off the secretive Triads.

In a potentially promising casting choice a few years too late, former Japanese idol and martial arts star Hiroyuki Sanada plays Kenji, Lee’s wayward adopted brother who is now a prominent Triad member. After Kenji acts as the trigger man in the assassination, he and Lee become destined to clash from opposite sides of the law.

Clues in the case lead Carter and Lee to Paris where they get mixed up with a local cab driver who has a love-hate relationship with America and a burlesque starlet marked for death by the Triads. Along the way, film legends Max von Sydow and Roman Polanski fill out throwaway supporting roles that will likely go unappreciated by fans of either the actors or this franchise. Routine car chases, comedy exchanges and ultra-light screen fighting mixed throughout provide a weak buildup to a final confrontation high up on the Eiffel Tower. Didn’t we see something similar with Chan on Big Ben in SHANGHAI KNIGHTS?

After pitiful Hong Kong entries like THE MYTH and ROB-B-HOOD it was hard to imagine Chan falling any more flat, until now. It’s depressing to see him this way. Imagine watching a champion racehorse limping down the greenway long after his prime while his talentless rider vainly eggs him on to the finish, knowing that audiences will stay on their seats just to see the sorry spectacle.

Chan manages a few token fighting moves reminiscent of the good old days but really, those days are gone. The only fight worth mentioning takes place between Chan and Sanada and only because of the people involved. In this and all other action scenes green screens, poorly disguised wirework and stunt doubles do most of the actual work. Chan has become an artist without an inspiration, a singer without a voice. Actually, the latter is untrue. Chan makes up for Tucker’s annoying attempts at comic karaoke by revealing his Chinese opera-trained singing voice which has been put to use on past Hong Kong soundtracks and Canto-pop albums. Chan might want to keep that throat in shape because it’s increasingly looking like his action-comedy acting days are numbered.

The only part of RUSH HOUR 3 that possesses any spark of creativity is the original score where Lalo Schifrin freshens up his pervious RUSH HOUR theme music with a funky new twist. The rest of this film is a dismal affair that I can’t recommend to anyone in good conscience. A pair of ten-to-twelve year olds that I was sharing the theater with seemed to be having a good time. I guess jokes about rectal exams, conning dancehall girls out of their clothes and casually generalizing all Americans as gun-crazed murderers are popular on schoolyards today, although the uninspired physical humor got the biggest laughs. Oh but the movie is once again another commercial success, if less so than its predecessor, and marketed perfectly for a mainstream audience fed on a daily diet of media reports covering the latest pop star meltdown.

Congratulations to Brett Ratner. If his goal was to direct lazy commercial fluff, the equivalent of cheap filmic fast food, then he has definitely earned his pay. It looks like Hollywood officially has its own latter-day Wong Jing. After X-MEN: THE LAST STAND and RUSH HOUR 3, I am afraid to see what franchise Ratner demolishes next, whether his own or someone else’s.

If like me, you’re suffering ill effects from watching this waste of 90 minutes then I would prescribe a sizable dose of DRUNKEN MASTER 2, followed by either POLICE STORY 3 or PROJECT A.