Review: Rush Hour (1998)

Damn!!! Its another good review! Wow! I really need to see more Bad movies. Its too bad I missed the Avengers! Bad reviews are so much more fun to write. It seems like I only write reviews about good movies. That’s strange since I remember seeing quite a bit of crap this summer (Godzilla, Armageddon, Disturbing Behavior, The Parent Trap, etc.) Rush Hour is the latest good/great film I have seen after Zorro, Ever After, Blade and many more.

Rush Hour, if you haven’t heard, marks Hong Kong superstar Jackie Chan’s first American film in over 10 years (and his first good one). It also marks the superstars pairing with comedic loudmouth Chris Tucker. And it’s another one of those generic Buddy Cop movies spawned in the eighties with the likes of 48 hours and Lethal Weapon. Or is it?

It would be, but Chan and Tucker are both very un-generic actors. Each star brings their own originality to what would be stale city with let’s say…Mel Gibson and Danny Glover (speaking of which that reminds me of more crap I saw over the summer). If you’ve heard of Jackie Chan then you know what he does; a gifted physical comedian with amazing acrobatic skill which he puts to beautiful use as an acting star. If you’ve heard of Chris Tucker then you know what he does; an African-American comedian who talks really fast and can be very funny or very annoying. Thank god he was mostly the former in this film!

In the movie, a Chinese ambassador’s daughter is kidnapped. The ambassador ask that his friend Detective Lee (Jackie Chan) be put on the case, but the FBI doesn’t want the embarrassment of having a foreigner solving their case, so they enlist- as some sort of punishment- a LAPD cop (Chris Tucker) to keep him out of their way. But of course that doesn’t work, otherwise we’d have no movie. So, predictably, Chan and Tucker begin their own investigation.

Rush Hour is an Action Comedy - the Action is great - the Comedy is wonderful - Chan supplies most of the action while Tucker handles most of the comedy, but once in a while they intercept each other and swap places. Both Chan and Tucker are great comedians, and while Chan is the action legend, Tucker can pull a few literal punches. The comedy and come fast and furious, not in clumps (There’s Something About Mary). The action comes just as fast and also not in clumps (unlike most recent Hong Kong Chan films). Rush Hour is the best buddy cop film in ages.

Here are my quibbles: - Some of the humor comes at the expense of seemingly racist remarks, this is very slight and should only bother the terribly PC. - The "secret bad guy" (a plot twist found in almost all action films these days) is easy to spot out in the first five minutes. - minor plot holes that only I probably noticed (the disappearing limp).

But these are only small problems balanced out by small pleasures, such as the funny and not annoyingly cute little Chinese girl and the awesome music (traditional Chinese meets Urban beats). My favorite action scene, for those who care, was the very funny part where Jackie had to beat up the baddies without breaking the Chinese artifacts. Tee Hee. Also I loved the way that the other cops treated Tucker. Very funny stuff.

Rush Hour is not Dr. Zhivago, but it is funny and fast and while make an hour and a half seem like a day of pure fun.

8/10