Third Time's The Harm
Written: Aug 22 '07 (Updated Aug 22 '07)
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Product Rating:
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| Bang For The Buck |
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Pros: There is nothing good about this movie.
Cons: Insensitivity, script is atrocious, terrible action, worse humor
The Bottom Line: The worst movie I've seen all year; Jackie Chan is on his last legs; so bad it's not funny.
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| JiggyJay's Full Review: Rush Hour 3 |
Jackie Chan used to be an action superstar; a beloved Asian actor/martial artist/singer/comedian who produced such films as the Operation Condor movies, the Police Story flicks, and the excellent Project A in his past catalogue. Come 1996 after the critical success of his film, Jackie Chan’s First Strike, he was auctioned off to American audiences with studio execs hoping to cash in with Bruce Lee type figures—since no martial arts films were all too popular as Jean Claude Van Damme and Steven Seagal had recently gone the way of the dodo.
The first movie he was a part of, created for an American audience, with an American attitude, was 1998’s smash hit, Rush Hour. Teaming up with loudmouth ghetto superstar, Chris Tucker, who had a small cult following after his roles in the loved Fifth Element film and fun pothead Smokie in the Ice Cube’s Friday movie, Rush Hour hit film-goers with a great mix of comedy and action as the west met the east. The results were excellent and surely enough, a few years pass and another Rush Hour film is pumped out which created big box office numbers and a staying power with older fans of Jackie Chan’s (who’s a superstar overseas) and new ones alike.
The thought of a sequel to Rush Hour 2 was inevitable and fans (like me) eagerly awaited the return of Chris Tucker’s James Carter and Jackie Chan’s Chief Inspector Lee, but after years of drawbacks such as Tucker’s ever-selfish move to try and milk the most money out of the picture (making him a fat paycheck that tripled Jackie Chan’s and the director, Brett Ratner’s) as well as script problems, the project failed to really get off the ground…until last year when everyone involved pushed it off the ground and the outcome is this Summer’s newest Three-quel (with the Bourne, Pirates, Shrek, Spiderman, etc. before it) and biggest disappointment of the year—especially for fans, like me, who have been waiting almost four years for the newest installment.
The biggest flop about this film in particular is the script and the plot that involves an assassination attempt on Foreign Ambassador Han (from the first RH film) leading to the most dangerous Chinese Triads currently running their businesses out of…France(?). This leads Chief Inspector Lee and James Carter to track down the evil doers after they promise Han’s daughter, Soo Yung (the kidnapped little girl from the original RH), that the bad guys will be brought to justice.
The fight goes all the way to France where Lee and Carter must learn about the French, know the customs, protect a woman who has the secrets of the Triads, and—whoa—another plot point. This curve ball of ‘protect the Frenchwoman’ was thrown in halfway through the movie and led to the increased length (since we all know the movie would’ve ended sooner without this little quip).
So let’s sum it up. Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan go to France after Chinese gang members to protect a French woman who has knows the secrets of the Triads and find out who tried to assassinate Ambassador Han. That’s the plot and it’s certainly the weakest in the entire series. No kidnapped girl. No big plot to scam Las Vegas betters.
Not only that, but the plot is so minimal. The largest part of the screen time is lent to throwaway scenes that try and make you get reacquainted with the main characters. This is where the movie falls to the flattest note in my opinion. Everything in the script is so throwaway that it is unbearable. Many of the scenes are wastes of screen time and many of the situations are so downright sloppily written that I cannot even fathom how this project got greenlit.
For one, many of the situations that Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker get into are so out of control in a bad way. Let’s run through the list:
Chief Inspector Lee and James Carter sing alongside cabarets. Check for the most awkward moment of the film.
Jackie Chan making a statement about wanting to see a dirty movie--thus dampening the stellar reputation of his character that has been so well-straightened for ten years. Check.
An atrociously rushed together back-story involving more of Chief Inspector Lee’s past, which was downright boring and shockingly bad. Yep.
But certainly the most shocking development in Rush Hour 3 is how much it borrows from the past films in the series. There are so many lines that return and the jokes are so deja vu that it made me feel embarrassed. For instance:
Believe it or not, the movie starts with Chris Tucker singing and dancing…big surprise there.
Chief Inspector Lee and James Carter have a petty conflict with the argument ending after a few scenes of detachment.
James Carter chasing after women and being chauvinistic—failing miserably.
A femme fatale is introduced that directly mirrors Ziyi Zhang’s from Rush Hour 2.
Jackie Chan embarrassing himself as he talks like a stereotypical African American.
And the movie goes on and on like the energizer bunny full of cheap laughs that seemed pasted together hastily at a Kinko’s…that’s not even to mention much of the clearly seen plotholes. I have never seen a movie quite like this one where two of the main secondary characters vanish and reappear near the end hastily to tie the loose ends. It’s so sloppy that it’s simply stunning.
As for humor, I’m sorry to say that not once did I laugh at Rush Hour 3…wait, correction, my girlfriend and I were laughing at how bad the movie was. There were many times throughout the movie that the film’s melodrama got the best of me. Much of the dialogue is so stiff that it’s uncomfortable especially the stuff between Soo Yung and the two ‘heroes’. But not only that, the humor has gotten downright low. I always thought the Rush Hour films had a dignified way to make me laugh—not too low brow, but smart sometimes. With the third installment, the humor is downright bitter and too sassy. Much of the humor was so poor that the only laughter coming out of my theatre was the junior high kids to the left side of me.
And what humor, too. Right from the get-go, James Carter talks about how all people of Middle-Eastern descent were terrorists (evoking a large ‘cricket chirp’ at my theatre and a hand over my mouth) as well as some of the most arrogant American bullcrap I have ever heard involving Chris Tucker putting a gun to a French taxi driver’s head and forcing him to sing the National Anthem. But at the points that weren’t insensitive and terribly inappropriate, they seemed to mimic the recent Will Ferrell humor—obviously striving to win teenage audiences and find newer fans to the series.
Being that the first two films were a perfect mixture of action and comedy (that I think was definitely better than the buddy-movie movies Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights that Jackie Chan did with Owen Wilson shortly after Rush Hour), I expected some cool action scenes since I think that Jackie Chan is one of the most valuable martial artists to ever be filmed. Well, surprise!: Jackie Chan not work on the fight choreography or stunt coordination, he also had a stunt double for all of his stunts.
This is very clear right from the start and up to the end. The fight scenes are lazy and overlap each other so well that all of the fights are boring and look too similar. No longer are they smart or use a great structure that Chan is known for. In fact, much of his action involves guns in some way. I think it’s safe to say that when I see Jackie Chan handling a gun (much like in the case of his 2003 flop, The Medallion), Hell has frozen over.
But that’s not it: the climax of the film is computer generated—even more so than in the past of the series. He’s not really climbing on the Eiffel Tower and he sure as hell isn’t risking his neck hanging from a harness. It’s so cheaply done too that it makes me think that Brett Ratner is really one of the biggest reasons this movie did so poorly.
Because of his success with last summer’s hit X-Men 3: The Last Stand, he seemed to have a handle on digital effects and they are quite evident here as is his terrible vision for filming boring fight sequences with little to no originality or depth and his job of just filming a scene just to get it done—not doing multiple takes or explanations to really voice a better comedic timing effect.
In a recent article in Portland, Oregon’s The Mercury publication, there was a large article on Jackie Chan’s involvement in Rush Hour 3 including his complete disgust with the finished project where he (not a direct quote mind you) felt violated because the cast and mainly Brett Ratner would tell him to say things, which he would, and everyone would laugh at him. This is seen in the closing bloopers where Ratner keeps telling Chan to say many sexually explicit things involving a dirty movie that has Chan admitting that he doesn’t know what he’s saying, it’s just what Brett Ratner told him to.
Chris Tucker, who I am (was) a fan of, also grew gratingly annoying as the movie went on. His egomaniacal attitude was just too much to swallow—clearly evidence of his large paycheck and rights to the series—and instead of how good his egotism and chauvinism worked well for him in the past, now it’s so overplayed, that it comes off too thick, which led to me to really be tired of his character at the end. More than that, the dynamics between Chan and him are awkward and didn’t seem to flow smoothly like in the past. Instead of feeling realistically friendly, they looked like they were put together just for this film…nothing more and I didn’t like that at all.
Many characters return to this movie although sadly enough the interesting Elizabeth Pena (who played the bomb squad girl in the first one who bounced insults off Carter quite cleverly) doesn’t return and neither does the dull Roselyn Sanchez, who if you remember correctly was Lee’s love interest and FBI agent. But surprisingly enough the excellent Philip Baker Hall (Carter’s boss) makes a great cameo appearance as does Tzi Ma, who plays Ambassador Han. Other actors of interest included in the package is a cameo by none other than Roman Polanski (why he’s in this movie is beyond me), Max von Sydow who I instantly recognized from Minority Report in the ‘Rich-White-Man’ role, and Yvan Attal, who plays the French taxi driver turned sidekick to Carter and Lee. He’s very wasted in this movie, however, as he is awfully a Frenchman trying hard to be American and in doing so thinking that he’s an American spy.
I think that a movie like this, which clearly had years and years worth of time to be something extraordinary, but the overall result is so extremely poor, that I wonder just what the development team were doing all these years crafting something so bad. It’s more than a waste of money; it’s a slap in the face to fans of the series with having the third movie a parody of itself. Instead of taking the highroad and revisiting some themes such as how the plot involving characters from the original Rush Hour and maybe explaining the transition between the second Rush Hour film and this one so (at the end of the second they were headed to New York City to visit Inspector Lee’s love interest—what happened to that?!), the finished product is a terrible piece of work—hopefully a widespread hoax until the real Rush Hour 3 comes forward. How did a five-star series go to a one-star flop?
(copyright) Jason Haskins, 2007
Related Reviews
The Legend of the Drunken Master 2 (Jackie Chan)
Recommended:
No
Movie Mood: Die-hard Fans Only
Viewing Method: Studio Screening/Premiere
Film Completeness: A few glitches, but mostly complete.
Worst Part of this Film: Script
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Epinions.com ID:
JiggyJay
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Member: Jason Haskins
Location: Portland, Oregon
Reviews written: 653
Trusted by: 308 members
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