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Six whole years after the last Rush Hour movie, Chris Tucker returns to play James Carter (the only character he’s played in the last nine years, incidentally), an LAPD detective who can’t seem to keep himself out of trouble. When the Chinese ambassador decides to come forward to reveal the name of the leader of the Chinese Triad secret society, Carter’s old friend, Chief Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan), comes to town to protect him. But the ambassador is shot and nearly killed—and Carter and Lee once again join together to try to bring down the Triad for good. The case eventually takes them to Paris—and to the beautiful Genevieve (Noémie Lenoir), who may have what Lee and Carter are looking for.
I found Rush Hour 3 to be a troubling movie. You see, I know I’m not supposed to like it. I even know how ridiculous it is. Still, I couldn’t help but enjoy it. Call it a guilty pleasure. Blame it on my recent addiction to cheesy Hong Kong flicks. But I think, for now, I’ll just call it craptastic.
Rush Hour 3 is all kinds of crazy. The writing is cheesy, and the jokes are overdone. The acting is totally over-the-top. The plot is predictable and blatantly obvious. There are all kinds of rip-offs (or let’s just say homages) of other movies. And it stars Chris Tucker (no, that’s not a good thing). But it’s goofy and slapstick, and it still made me laugh anyway.
At the same time, though, I’ll admit that Rush Hour 3 walks the very fine line between tongue-in-cheek and just plain bad. There’s one scene, for example, when Lee and Carter arrive at the hospital to visit the ambassador. All of the security guards are gone—and if you’ve seen The Godfather, you know right away what’s going to happen. But instead of just removing the security guards, director Brett Ratner chose to remove everyone. The guards, the nurses, the doctors, the visitors—all gone. Some might see that as a horrible oversight in Ratner’s attempt to make a serious movie. I, on the other hand, prefer to see it as Ratner making a joke of the horribly stereotypical situation. He does it subtly, though—instead of playing it up—so I could be wrong (then again, I can’t imagine that I could ever be wrong, so I’m probably right). But sometimes I like to give people the benefit of the doubt—so I’ll just say that he meant to do it.
And perhaps I just enjoyed Rush Hour 3 because it’s a ramped-up version of the Hong Kong movies I’ve been watching lately. It has the same ridiculous humor, the same silly one-liners, the same over-acting, and the same slapstick action (and lots of it!). So I guess I’ve gotten used to it. If you haven’t been watching action-comedies from Hong Kong recently, maybe you just won’t be able to laugh at the whole ridiculous mess that is Rush Hour 3 the same way I did. Or maybe you’ll be able to sit back and enjoy it for what it is—a silly action movie that doesn’t even think about taking itself seriously. It’s cheesy, and, at times, the jokes are so corny that they’ll make you groan. But if you enjoy over-the-top humor and Jackie Chan’s signature fight scenes, you might just get a kick (bad pun totally intended) out of Rush Hour 3.
