"Rush Hour 3"

Silly and crude, sure -- but this third movie in the Chris Tucker/Jackie Chan franchise is also strangely brilliant.

By Stephanie Zacharek

Read more: Stephanie Zacharek, Movies, Jackie Chan, Movie Reviews, Arts & Entertainment, Reviews

© New Line Cinema

Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan in "Rush Hour 3."

Aug. 10, 2007 | "Rush Hour 3" is crass, stupid and crudely made. It's also, in places, weirdly brilliant, a picture that plays to the largest possible audience with mechanical efficiency but also, here and there, betrays glimmers of self-deprecating cleverness, as if it were striving, perhaps even unconsciously, to transcend its own dumbness. One minute Chris Tucker is cracking lame Ex-Lax jokes; the next, Max von Sydow -- as an absurdly dignified dignitary -- is classing up the joint with his stately jowls. Exactly what is going on here? I'm still not sure, but when Roman Polanski shows up, as a disheveled, tweedy French police inspector who specializes in anal-cavity searches, he's like a walking in joke: Either you know who he is or you don't, but the movie is a little bit funnier, and a little bit stranger, if you do. "Rush Hour 3" even dares to recycle, with obvious affection, an old Abbott and Costello gag. (It kicks off with the explosive declaration "I am Yu!") I wish "Rush Hour 3" were better, but I'll grant director Brett Ratner this much: He knows that homage isn't a kind of cheese.

Together, the 1998 "Rush Hour" and the 2001 "Rush Hour 2," both directed by Ratner, made nearly $600 million worldwide. That's a lot of shekels, so you can understand why Ratner and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (who also wrote "Rush Hour 2") wouldn't want to stray too far from an already-successful formula.

The curious thing about "Rush Hour 3" is that it makes you doubt the central equation of that formula to begin with: Tucker and his costar, Jackie Chan, have almost no chemistry. Sometimes they barely seem to inhabit the same movie. Whatever rapport they have comes through mostly in the movie's outtakes -- which are both a "Rush Hour" and a Jackie Chan-movie tradition, shown alongside the movie's closing credits -- particularly in the way Chan can always crack Tucker up with his goofily poetic malapropisms.

There's no doubt that "Rush Hour 3" is anything but a mess. And yet ... and yet. There were moments when I found myself laughing giddily at the inanity of it all, and other moments when the picture was so lavish and beautiful to look at that I almost forgot its faults. (It was shot, partly on location in Paris, by J. Michael Muro.) The story, if it matters, has detectives Carter (Tucker) and Lee (Chan) searching Los Angeles for the Triad bigwigs who've ordered a (failed) assassination attempt on a Chinese ambassador (Tzi Ma). Their search takes them to -- where else? -- Paris, that hotbed of Triad activity. The movie's climactic sequence takes place at the Eiffel Tower, and that, if Ratner actually knew where to put the camera to capture the action cleanly, would certainly be something to watch.

Still, thanks to Muro, it all looks OK, and even the script has a few surprising jolts. In Los Angeles, where the story opens, Chan and Lee capture an Asian gangster who has come to the hospital where the wounded Chinese ambassador is recuperating, hoping to finish him off. The only problem is, the gangster speaks just French, and the one available French speaker is a nun, Sister Agnes (played with marvelous, beatific élan by Dana Ivey), whose eyebrows get a workout in response to the guy's gutter mouth. She listens to him spit and sputter and tells Carter, in measured tones, that "he used the 'N' word." Carter responds by urging her to tell the guy he's "a piece of 'S'" -- and so on. The gag barrels forward, growing more absurd and more tangled, and even though Ratner doesn't seem to have much of a gift for harnessing his actors' timing, the sequence survives his clumsiness.

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