Is This Kind of Cop To Be Encouraged?

© By Kevin Paquet, 2007

"Rush Hour 3" is the fourth "Threequel" I've seen this summer, and this is the one I feel comes closest to matching the look and feel of the original two, which you have probably seen a combined total of 12 times because there was a fairly lengthy window of time last year when they made up the majority of the programming on TBS.

"Rush Hour" and its sequels are based around two police officers- Detective Carter (Chris Tucker) and Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) who, between them, have enough street smarts and people skills to comprise one fully-functional cop.

It goes without saying that these films are based around humor and what redneck film critic Joe Bob Briggs calls "chopsocky," meaning I can cross that off my list of Genres to Review. Indeed, this film manages to use combat as a very effective supplement for traditional quality.

Lee and Carter go to France to hunt down the people who tried to kill the Chinese ambassador when he was divulging critical secrets at a UN meeting. The ambassador's daughter (Jingchu Zhang) pleads with the duo to catch the bad guys, who in this case are the leaders of the largest criminal organization on the planet. Spooky, I know.

The rest of the movie proceeds at knee-jerk speed through combat sequence, plane flight, cavity search, combat sequence, combat sequence, car explosion, etc. Highlights of this montage include George (Yvan Attal), a French taxi cab driver, whom Carter instructs in the "Star-Spangled Banner" at gunpoint. In fact, there are no less than four Chris Tucker songs in this movie, a fact viewers may wish to relate to their audiologists at their next checkups. Dude's got a singing voice like a car alarm.

And then, following more fighting, the movie ended. The ending was so abrupt that, if it was not for the fact that Jackie and Chris dance away just before the credits start to roll, I would swear the theater had lost the final reel. This film, which had managed, through martial arts and topical humor, to overcome a very stiff opening, simply ends after about an hour and a half.

I pronounce this film decent. Usually I'm left with a certain amount of personal distrust in my conclusion, but not with this one. The plot was pretty crummy, but most of the acting was pretty good. Jackie Chan is still good at what he does.

Chris Tucker's character, however, gave me some pause. Although I enjoyed much of Detective Carter's banter- I think that, deep down, we all want to be the bulletproof wise guy- he is a spectacularly poor role model in his police tactics. I'm not saying that every film cop should be a good film cop; I'd just like a dividing line, with Dirty Harry on one side and Sherlock Holmes on the other. Particularly troubling for me was his comment about arresting Iranian scientists for being Iranian early in the film. You may make of that what you will.

That otherwise unrelated burst of ethical inquiry aside, this film is a worthy addition to its counterparts, which are probably showing on TBS right now. Bonus points for George the Cab Driver, the Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan duet, and the blooper reel, where Jackie puts his foot through a table and then manages to hit himself over the head with it. Kevin gives it two and a half stars out of five.