Word: rushing
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...Chan, the sweet-souled masochist of Hong Kong action comedies, made four Hollywood-based movies after Rush Hour 2, plus three starring roles in Hong Kong films, but they didn't do much business, and one, Around the World in 80 Days, cost $110 million to produce and took in far less than half that. After 53 years on this planet, 30 as the hardest working star on any continent, with virtually every bone in his body broken while performing his daredevil stunts, Chan may have worn out not his welcome so much as himself...
...pleasure to report that the new Rush Hour is... OK. Brett Ratner, who directed the first two episodes (as well as the third X-Men and the Hannibal Lecter movie Red Dragon), isn't out to win an Oscar here; the movie is as lacking in visual elegance as it is in pretension. Its first reel or two sets a fairly low bar for the viewer, so that when it perks up it exceeds expectations. The division of labor is the same as in the first two films: Jackie kicks ass; Chris kicks sass. Ratner's challenge, and that...
...show all the fighting you would in an R-rated film, but don't show the toll it takes on the loser. Punches are fine, but no closeups of broken jaws; throw a guy off a rooftop, but don't show him landing impaled on an obelisk. Rush Hour 3 observes these niceties while twitting another MPAA rule: no four-letter words. In an early scene where Carter is interrogating a French-speaking thug through an interpreter, he gets exasperated and shouts: "You tell this piece of s-word that I will personally f-word him up." Excellent solution...
...this in perspective: the first Rush Hour was a pretty good movie, the second one pretty lame. The threequel is somewhere in between: nothing special but with a high amiability quotient. The two stars know they click; it's no crime for them to extend and exploit that good vibe one more time...
...mandatory blooper bits that accompany the closing credits, there's one where Tucker has just heard an angry Chan tell him they're not brothers. "I'm not your brother?" he squeals. "After all that we been through? Rush Hour 1? Rush Hour Hour 2?" That line alone justifies sitting through Rush Hour 3. I mean, what do you want from a summer threequel anyway...