Rush Hour 3 Movie Review

The new Brett Ratner movie, "Rush Hour 3," is a lazy pile-up of stale ideas and so-so stuntwork that fails to recharge the franchise in ways that, say, the recent " “The Bourne Ultimatum” did. That movie also was the third in a series, but instead of sitting back and trading off its good reputation, it made an effort to offer fresh thinking within a familiar scene.

Not so for "Rush Hour 3."

Instead of holding the bar high for the slapstick genre as "Ultimatum" did for the action genre, this cloying, fractured slop of uninspired swill is content to swim among summer’s worst. It's here only to grab the box office booty, which it achieved, neatly earning New Line Cinema nearly $50 million last weekend alone. Good for them.

Unfortunately, not so good for us.

Returning for a paycheck after six years apart are Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, who reprise their roles as Inspector Lee and LAPD Detective James Carter, a mismatched couple of cops who find themselves trying to track down those responsible for attempting to assassinate the Chinese ambassador Han (Tzi Ma).

When they promise the ambassador’s daughter (Zhang Jingchu) that they will track down Han's would-be killers, it’s a situation that pulls Lee and Carter out of Los Angeles and into Paris, where Ratner and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson find unconvincing ways to launch into a diatribe against the war in Iraq.

They do so by shoehorning into the script a testy French cab driver (Yvan Attal) whose hatred of Americans is just one of the film's many clichés. Initially, the cabbie is here only to bash, and while his rant against the war does have its merits, in this film, it presses against the comedic edges in ways that rub them raw.

Is anyone really going to "Rush Hour 3" for social commentary? Isn’t that sort of like going to "Porky's Revenge" expecting Merchant Ivory? Still, the movie presses onward, laying waste with a mess of lame jokes as the duo take on Lee's evil brother (Hiroyuki Sanada) and an evildoer played by a slumming Max von Sydow.

Roman Polanski shows up to twirl his mustache in a bum bit part, but nothing here is as awful as the nerve-jangling falsetto of Tucker’s voice. If ever there was a person who has worn out his welcome onscreen, it’s this dude--and he's made only three films in the past nine years, all of them "Rush Hour" movies. Perhaps it's time for a vocal coach. Or time to retire.

Unlike the last two films, "Rush Hour 3" lacks the great stuntwork audiences expect, though that shouldn’t come as a surprise. Chan now is 53, and he no longer can launch into the beautifully conceived fight scenes for which he became famous. Toward the end of the movie, he is allowed an extended sequence atop the Eiffel Tower that’s fun to watch even if it isn’t him doing all the work, but the scene comes too late in a film that never should have been allowed to park curbside in the first place.

Grade: D