Movie Review: Rush Hour 3

Starring: Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker
Rated PG-13
Release date: 8/20/2007 (U.S.)
Official site: http://www.rushhourmovie.com/

I’m a great fan of Jackie Chan and the Rush Hour franchise. Unfortunately, Rush Hour 3 is pathetically bad. It’s in the same league as “Howard the Duck” and “Ishtar.” It’s not even worth renting as a video.

The adventure doesn’t continue in New York
Rush Hour 2 set my expectation that we’d see our heroes continue their adventures in New York City. I wanted to see them living it up at the Plaza and catching a game at Madison Square Garden. Inexplicably, RH3 is set in Paris. Lee and Carter’s adventure in New York and the failed romance between Lee and Isabella is just a bit of exposition. And it’s not satisfying.

I know the idea was to put both Lee and Carter into “fish out of water” environments, but that could have been accomplished in New York.

The buddies aren’t buddies
Lee and Carter aren’t buddies any more. It’s eventually explained that Carter played a role in the failed romance between Lee and Isabella; however, it’s more interesting to watch a relationship form or dissolve than hear about it in exposition. It’s not interesting to watch two disinterested people go through the motions of adventure.

This left our heroes without the arcs that made RH1 and 2 so appealing. In RH1, Carter learns to work with a partner and care about something outside of himself. In RH2, Lee and Carter become true friends and Lee finds romance. In RH3, it would have been nice to see Carter find true romance and to risk his life for it. It just seemed that not enough was at stake in RH3 for the buddies to re-establish their endearing friendship.

The motivation for the heroes and villains is weak and unclear—even who some of the villain ARE is unclear

In RH1, Juntao kidnaps Han’s daughter for revenge and big bucks. Lee is motivated to get the crime boss, rescue Han’s daughter, and avenge his former partner’s death.

In RH2, Tan and Hu Li are protecting their casino used for money laundering. Lee is motivated to stop the crime boss and avenge his father’s murder.
In RH3, Han discovers the location of a list of triad warlords. Instead of getting the list, he decides to announce its existence to the U.N. and gets shot. The rest of the movie is Lee and Carter trying to locate the list. There’s gratuitous T&A, but no money, threat, or romance driving the story forward.

Lee’s “brother” appears twice as a bad guy, but it’s unclear as to whether he’s a warlord or working for a warlord or what. Also, there’s a female Asian assassin who shows up twice to kick Lee’s butt—I don’t know who she is or why she wanted a piece of Lee either. (She and Chan did an excellent scene with a Chinese fighting fan though.)

The stunts are boring
The opening stunt of RH3 is one where Jackie Chan jumps through a one-story window, slides down a pole and runs across the freeway. This is WAY less interesting than the opening boxcar stunt of RH1 and scaffolding stunt of RH2.

The fights on the Eiffel Tower are too much like the ones we saw at the end of RH1 and would have been more amazing in the days before CGI. Jackie Chan is still a stud cake, but he’s not 25 any more.

There are too many scenes that don’t move the story forward
When Lee and Carter get to Paris, they’re beaten and strip-searched by the police—for no apparent reason. It doesn’t move the story forward. The only thing that makes it funny is that the infamous Roman Polanski does the strip-search.