Rush Hour 3

Review By: Michael Dance
MichaelDance@TheCinemaSource.com

I have nothing in particular against the Rush Hour movies. They’re too generic for that. If you ever meet anyone unfamiliar to the Hollywood moviemaking system we have in place today, just show them a Rush Hour movie, because they have everything you need to know: action scenes, a PG-13 rating, a few girls in lingerie, cops, criminals, comic relief from a wisecracking black guy, the works. It’s all covered.

It’s been a long six years since the second installment came out, when I was not yet a high school upperclassman. My friends and I went to see American Pie 2, and after it was over nobody wanted to go home so we snuck into another theater and started watching Rush Hour 2 instead. Ah, the memories.

Sorry, back on topic. It’s just hard to come up with something to say about a movie that strives toward nothing more than to be as unexceptional as possible. The plot is, well, eh, who cares. There’s some kind of secret organization, and an assassination attempt on somebody, and that sort of thing. One of the good guys is secretly a bad guy, but you’ll realize that the second he appears on screen. Jeff Nathanson is a talented enough screenwriter (he did Catch Me If You Can) but he’s not even trying here. It’s as though he never bothered to revise the script whatsoever in order to iron out logistics and continuity. Sure, he hits those major plot beats and provides ample space for comic and fight interludes, but none of the minor cause-and-effect logic makes any sense when you really think about it (and trust me, your mind will be wandering).

Just one example of how shoddily each scene is set up: our heroes Carter (Chris Tucker) and Lee (Jackie Chan) think a young woman visiting her injured father in a hospital is in grave danger. They rush back to the hospital, which is for some reason completely empty except for the father’s room, where the girl sits. Lee draws back the window shade a tiny bit, and luckily the 10-by-10 square foot section of the parking lot he’s able to see happens to be the exact spot where a handful of assassins are casually climbing out of their car. After they come up, a gunfight commences in the hospital wing, which has been and remains completely devoid of any doctors, nurses and patients. I guess they heard a fight scene was about to be staged there.

Speaking of the fight scenes, it may just be that my memory of the previous films