‘Rush Hour 3’: We’ve been
down this road before

At the Movies
By Senitra Horbrook

Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, but the six years between Rush Hour 2 and Rush Hour 3 didn’t do much to give me a change of heart.
I wouldn’t advise anyone to rush out and see Rush Hour 3. It has a few funny moments and a few good fight scenes, but I don’t really see the point of this movie, and it doesn’t do enough to distinguish itself from Rush Hour and Rush Hour 2.
Maybe a different director would have been able to inject new life into this franchise, but, unfortunately, Brett Ratner makes Rush Hour 3 the same fish out of water, a buddy comedy like the previous two, except here we have the beautiful backdrop of Paris.
Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) and Detective Carter (Chris Tucker) start out in Los Angeles. Lee is a bodyguard to Ambassador Han (whose daughter was the subject of the first Rush Hour movie) while Carter is a traffic cop who sings along with his iPod while he directs traffic.
After an attempted assassination of Ambassador Han, Lee and Carter meet up once again and head to Paris to find the culprit. The attempt to knock off Han involves some sort of gang known as the Triad, to which a beautiful French woman holds the key. The movie concludes in a dramatic scene atop the Eiffel Tower with near-death experiences for our two lead characters.
As in the previous Rush Hour flicks, Tucker’s character cracks jokes while Jackie Chan’s character cracks bones (not literally, but his martial arts skills are definitely on display). At 53, Chan is still very agile and swift. His fight scenes are fun to watch.
There is a pretty Asian lady who promises to give Lee what he wants, which turns out to be a nasty fight for his life. He dodges her knives while Carter listens outside the hotel-room door, thinking Lee is a "super-freak" because of the types of noises he hears in the room.
I wouldn’t say there any memorable lines — such as "Don’t you ever touch a black man’s radio," which was a humorous moment in Rush Hour — but there is some race-related humor here. Carter says he’s half-Chinese while Lee announces that he is a "brother," but I didn’t find any of it offensive.
Overall, the comedy is subpar. There are a few laugh-out-loud moments and some politically incorrect jokes. Reminiscent of Abbott and Costello’s Who’s on First? routine, Detective Carter can’t figure out the names of two men, even though they keep telling him their names are Yu and Mi.
There is a crazy French cab driver who at first proclaims he hates Americans because they only want to kill and have wars, then has a change of heart after a day of crimefighting with Lee and Carter. He then decides he wants to be an American spy.
There is an unexpected cameo from Roman Polanski (the actor/director who has lived in Europe since the 1970s to escape a prison sentence in the United States). Here he plays a deranged French cop.
Tucker and Chan work well together and seem to have a good rapport. They "have each other’s back" when trouble finds them. Chris Tucker’s voice can get annoying after a while, but thankfully the movie is less than two hours.
If you enjoyed the first two Rush Hour movies, chances are you will enjoy this one too — if you don’t mind a feeling of déjà vu.
At the very least, if you don’t find any of it funny, wait for the end. Sadly, the outtakes are funnier than any of the jokes in the movie. ••
Movie Grade: B-