Jet Li and Jason Statham have made a number of above-average action movies between them. Li has appeared in Fearless and Hero, which incorporated stunning martial-arts sequences into mythical storylines. Statham is best known for the Transporter films and Crank, no-nonsense action films that hardly slowed down and didn’t clutter their stories with sentimentality. Both are non-Americans, which may or may not be why they rarely seem as cocky as American action stars.
Here Statham plays a San Francisco FBI man who obsesses over the mysterious and little-seen assassin who three years earlier killed his partner. He spends the movie hunting down this assassin, who is called Rogue (Li). Rogue has shifted his allegiance from the Chinese Triads to their Japanese rivals and is ensured with the safe transfer of some valuable antiques that are to finance the expansion of the yakuza empire to the new world. Rogue is deadly but seems violent by trade rather than by nature. His motivations seem shrouded. There’s more to the story, but that’s the gist. The movie is quite violent—lots of shooting, lots of cutting—without there being a great deal of action. Li barely displays his martial arts skills. One decent chase sequence stands out, but the movie feels long. The twist ending, which you may or may not guess, isn’t enough to redeem a turgid movie with a higher body count than intelligence quotient. The way Rogue plays off his enemies against one another would be of more interest if those enemies were less one-dimensional.
IMDB link
reviewed 8/30/07
Showing posts with label Triads. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Triads. Show all posts
Friday, August 24, 2007
Friday, August 10, 2007
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
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
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