By Brandon Nolta

I walk into the theater and sit down maybe two minutes before the show starts. It’s a hot Sunday afternoon, and I expect a line to get into see RUSH HOUR 3, but the theater seems quiet. There are a few people scattered here and there, and a few more trickle in after I sit down. The boring crap on screen comes to an end, the trailers come and go, and the movie begins.

It’s a pretty serviceable plot: Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) is on protection detail for his old friend Ambassador Han (Tzi Ma), who is about to reveal important information about the Chinese Triad to the World Criminal Court.

Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) is on traffic detail, because he doesn’t know when to shut up and is working off the latest in what seems like a string of dumb moves, to the eternal chagrin of his boss (Philip Baker Hall, apparently in sore need of a paycheck). Suddenly, a mysterious assassin (Hiroyuki Sanada) shoots the ambassador and flees, starting a chain of events that lead Carter and Lee to Paris, to track down the mysterious list of Triad bosses, believed to be held by a beautiful chanteuse (Noemie Lenoir). Our hapless heroes dash to the City of Lights, helped by a mad cabbie (Yvan Attal) and hindered by an annoying policeman with a rubber glove fetish (Roman Polanski), and begin breaking stuff. Wacky hijinks ensue.

Or so you would think. There were surely lots of hijinks, but the wacky seems to have gone out of the franchise. The jokes are a little flat, most of the supporting actors look a little lost in the high-energy production, there’s a little too much Tucker (who is funny in short bursts, but not inventive enough for long jags) and not enough Chan, who is hamstrung both by the grandstanding of his co-star and the insurance requirements of Hollywood productions. Granted, Chan is 53, but he’s in great shape and still capable of lots of stunts that dudes half his age would have to get tremendously drunk to try. Anyway, Chan is a wonderful physical comedian, but he gets precious few chances to demonstrate that here.


The real problem with this movie is the script. A lot of folks will probably want to blame Ratner, who is seen as the Antichrist in some circles, but he does a pretty good job of staging and making the story flow visually. Just about everything that goes wrong here—the crap dialogue, the jokes that veer pretty close to racism at times, the occasional plot hole—can be traced directly back to what the actors were given. It’s certainly possible that studio interference dumbed this sucker down to broccoli, but Nathanson’s on-again, off-again record (he wrote CATCH ME IF YOU CAN, but also SPEED 2: CRUISE CONTROL) leads me to suspect he threw the scripts for the first two films in a blender, hit frappé, poured the mess out and handed it in after changing a few names and locations.

Overall, RUSH HOUR 3 was like drinking a Coke that’s been left out for a couple of hours. The flavor’s still there, but the fizz is gone, and you end up with a blah experience. It wasn’t as painful an experience as it could have been, and there were a few laughs here and there, but as the few theatergoers stood up and left the darkened auditorium to the roll of credits, I didn’t hear a lot of laughter or talking or anything like that. Just the rush of people looking to get on with their lives, the movie fading from their minds even before they left.