If you love old-shool humor, then Rush Hour Three will have you busting some serious gut. Although the plot is eerily reminiscent of the Rush Hour Two installment, the film still manages to deliver full throttle action while blending the hilarious antics of Tucker and Chan in a strata of purpsosefully simple dialogue that reverberates off the movie’s equally complex fight scenes and stunts. At one point there is a screeming parody of the Who’s on First classic that is just brilliant. Definitely worth a look.
If ‘old school humor’ implies a tasteless plot, inane dialogue and insipid sight gags – then yes… Rush Hour 3 is in fact, a comedic masterpiece.
A movie befitting moviegoers with I.Q. matching director Brett Ratner’s talents (or lack thereof), Rush Hour 3 is precisely what’s wrong with franchise kitsch that Hollywood has gotten into a habit of churning out.
And as a post-script, I sincerely suggest editing the post, changing the actor’s name from ‘ROCK’ to ‘TUCKER’, lest the comedic Chris Rock sues for being accused of lacking in both taste and integrity.
For the life of me I will never understand what people see in the RUSH HOUR movies.
I have gone to see all three Rush Hour films in the theatre only to witness Jackie Chan’s talent for physical comedy fall flat under Brett Ratner’s languorous direction. While I can put up with a lot of inane dialogue for a few good Chan stunts, there was nothing in the fight choreography in this film that hadn’t been done better by Chan himself in Supercop or by a far less physically talented actor in one of the more recent Bond films.
While Rush Hour 2 was slightly redeemed by a few deft, graceful moves from Ziyi Zhang (Memoirs of a Geisha, Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon), Rush Hour 3 completely underutilized the immensely talented Wu Ji (Sunshine, The Last Samurai). Director Ratner also failed to capture the immediacy of Youki Kudoh’s (Memoirs of a Geisha, Picture Bride) inventive wielding of a dagger fan during an early fight and again during a potentially hair raising final dual.
I find the Rush Hour trilogy to be particularly painful in their perpetuation of Black and Asian stereotypes, which have long been a staple of the American cinema. I think it is dangerous to say that this humor is “old school” as Abbott and Costello, Laurel and Hardy, Arbuckle and Keaton, … etc., while hardly bastions of multiculturalism, each used physical comedy to illuminate the absurdity of the modern human condition.
The only thing illuminated in this film was that Hollywood still prefers Black humor of the fried chicken variety and equates the Asian American experience with Short Round rolled up in a Mandarin pancake like so much Mu Shu.
You’ve written three and half sentences. I can’t really comment on your statements as a “review”, but I will say you must have been watching a completely different film from the rest of us. This film was stale at best. The “Who’s On First” wanna be scene with the “I am Hugh” business was actually stolen nearly word-for-word from Peter Bogdanovich’s “What’s Up Doc?”
Recycled and blah.