After Rush Hour 2 did the business at the box office, the franchise seemed primed to high kick confidently into trilogy territory, and yet a third adventure featuring Carter and Lee didn’t surface until 2007, a relative eternity in action/comedy terms.
But regardless of the risks of the franchise going off the boil during its absence, we soon found the fast feet of Jackie Chan and the even faster mouth of Chris Tucker reuniting for a third go-round that saw the mismatched lawman enacting their particular brand of mayhem in Paris. However, during their time away, it seemed that the world had moved on from Rush Hour’s particular brand of raucous humor with a lot of the jokes feeling either lazy, or, worse yet, worryingly problematic. The result is a movie that seems less like a long awaited comeback and more like an cynical opportunity for the major players to score sizable paydays.
Three years after the events of Rush Hour 2, we return to find Carter and Lee – pretty much where we found them the first time we met them. Inspector Lee has gone back to being the body guard of Chinese Ambassador Han while Carter is somehow still a police officer, albeit one that’s been temporarily busted down to traffic cop status due to some outlandish offence. However, after Han starts mouthing off about ending the Chinese mob once and for all with the aid Shy Shen, a mysterious, mythical individual thought to be of great importance to the triads, he sets himself neatly for an assassination attempt that sees him gravely injured by a sniper.
After giving chase in a typically frenzied manner, Lee finds that yet another face from his past who has turned to crime has surfaced in the form of his long lost foster brother, Kenji, who proves that our hero has more dodgy connections than a poorly planned train journey.
When Carter shows up on the scene for no other reason than he simply can’t keep his nose out of anything, the two buddies attempt to crack the case which starts with them thwarting another assassination attempt while Han recuperates in hospital and ends with the two cops finding a lead that results in a trip to France.
Given a whole new city to insult, terrorize and run roughshod over, Carter and Lee come into contact with various colourful characters such as George, a vehemently anti-American cab driver, Geneviève, a leggy stage performer who may have links to Shy Shen and a Parisian Commisaire with an unhealthy love of cavity searches. But if they don’t focus on the job at hand, Kenji’s next victim may be Han’s daughter, Soo Yung and Paris will be the city in which their friendship will meet a violent end.
While I have to say that I’ve never really recognized Rush Hourcas one of the premium action franchises, the first film had a huge amount of charm that derived from its mismatched pairing and I have a something of a sizable soft spot for the second that more that makes up for what it loses in logic with a sense of unrestrained lunacy. However, after about fifteen minutes of Rush Hour 3 you can’t help but notice that the fun, off-the-wall, chemistry has fizzled and what was a fun series of action goofs has settled into an awkward exhibition of phoning it in.
It starts off ok. We get to see a return from some characters from the original film (hello again, Ambassador Han and Soo Yung), we get some more scenes of Tucker’s Carter randomly dancing as he directs traffic and, most fun of all, we get some early comedy beats that shamelessly veer so far into the realms of vaudeville, I was genuinely surprised laywers from the estate of Abbott and Costello didn’t get in touch with a cease and desist order. But after Tucker gets to scream at two people after mistaking the names Yu and Mi for you and me, things start to feel like no one involved is even remotely interested in trying anything even close to new. While, say, Bad Boys 4 Life layered its ridiculous action beats with some surprisingly touching musing about aging, Rush Hour 3 is simply content to go through the motions and by god, it shows. There’s no real surprise that Jackie Chan has slowed way down (some of his fights a shot in such a way I’m not even 100% certain he actually does some of them this time), but even so, the perky brawls have now lost some of that zippy vigour. I’m not exactly sure how you make the sight of Jackie Chan and Hiroyuki Sanada sword fighting on the inner framework of the Eiffel Tower seem matter of fact, but Bret Ratner somehow finds a way and you feel that everyone involved would be far prefer to be filming yet another comedy skit.
However, even the humour seems off and moments where Carter mistakes the sound of an assassination attempt on Lee as the sounds of vigorous lovemaking or the two have to nonchalantly book into a swanky hotel after a dip in a Parisian sewer end up being as funny surprise proctology exam.
This actually becomes literal after an epically misjudged Roman Polanski cameo that sees the controversial filmmaker show up as a French detective who has a thing for impromptu cavity searches and promptly anally violates them, and this ultimately becomes a massive signifier to the humor taking something of a sinister turn. While the background controversies that surround both Ratner and Polanski are well known, there’s a noticable step up in the running joke that Carter has something of a high sex drive that now is just creepy as hell. When he isn’t having two, young, handcuffed women bent over a car while he arrests them and offers them leniency if they come on a date, he’s sneaking into a nightclub and pretends to be a clothed dresser in order to gave all the showgirls line up before him with their breasts out. Not only does it feel horribly dated (a moment when Carter is repulsed by Geneviève revealing that she’s bald would have felt iffy in the 90s) but the shift of Carter from obnoxious hound dog to out and out sexual predator just feels incredibly uncomfortable, especially in the light of the accusations since leveled at Ratner.
Anyway, sexual politics aside, if you have a Rush Hour movie where the action is bland and the humor doesn’t work, then where else is there to go? The plot? Listen, if you can actually be bothered to keep up with it then congratulations, because you obviously managed to focus on it far more than anyone on the film did, and even the presence of the likes of Sananda and Max Von Sydow can make it worth following.
Over the last few years, rumours have persisted that a fourth installment has been discussed between the powers that be with ever mounting seriousness.
No rush, guys. No rush.
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