Rush Hour 3 (*1/2)

It’s been six years since Rush Hour 2, and six years since Chris Tucker made a movie. I swear I kind of liked the first two movies in this series, so either this one is a lot worse or it just took awhile for me to become completely annoyed by Tucker’s character, James Carter. We first reacquaint ourselves with Carter, now a traffic cop, as he’s being berated for falsely arresting some Iranian scientists and trying to pick up some “sushi-grade” women for himself and Hong Kong-born Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan). Presumably, Carter thinks Japanese and Chinese are the same thing. As for the Iranians, just because they’re scientists “doesn’t mean they won’t blow shit up.” Carter’s too busy to socialize, acting as the bodyguard of Ambassador Han, who’s making a big speech about the Chinese Triad gangsters at the World Criminal Court. Thus reacquainted with our heroes, we follow the Triads’ trail to…France.

The movie shows a side of Paris you can only see on a studio backlot, the halfway decent climax in what’s supposed to be the Eiffel Tower the only apparent justification. That and a silly bit in which the boys question/threaten a Chinese-looking thug with the help of a multilingual nun because he only speaks...French. This may be the comic highlight, notwithstanding the civil-liberties violations, so you can imagine the lowlights. Incidentally and idiotically, the thug’s the only character in the movie who doesn’t speak English. A couple of the French characters can barely speak French, it would seem, notably the variably accented cabbie sidekick Carter and Lee acquire, who later argues with his wife...in English. It’s an odd contrast to the multiple scenes in which Lee speaks Chinese to other Chinese characters. Language also figures in what’s supposed to be a showcase scene for Tucker. Wandering into a dressing-room full of showgirls, he tells them he’s the costume designer. Having clearly demonstrated that he doesn’t know French, he nonetheless speaks in a French accent so he can a) blend in and b) have an excuse to ask the women to strip. Seen in a random sitcom, this would have been corny already. What really made it cringe-worthy was that the apparently lobotomized dancers appear to believe him. Watching this in a fairly crowded theater, I listened for laughter and heard not a peep.

Admittedly, the same audience pretty much stayed intact to watch the predictable outtakes at the end, so what do I know? Whether you like the movie pretty much will depend if you think Tucker’s Carter babbling a 90-minute stream of bullshit is funny. Yes, the plot is perforated like Swiss-cheese, yes, Brent Ratner’s direction and Jeff Nathanson’s script are uninspired, and yes, martial-arts expert Chan has lost a step or two, but that I didn’t laugh at all is what made the movie a truly trying experience. The mismatched partners schtick has worn very thin, too. Rush Hour 3 counts on distant memories of past installments to establish what these guys are doing together. The action parts, fewer than before, are fair to middling, the best being the one in the Tower. Chan there displays some of the dexterity he did in movies he made as a younger man. Overall, though, I felt like I was watching three episodes of a sitcom that had long since “jumped the shark.”

IMDB link

reviewed 8/12/07