Rush Hour
**1/2
Cinema
Releases - December 4,
1998
Rated on a 4-star
scale. USA. Directed by Brett Ratner. Written by Jim Kouf and Ross
Lamanna. Starring Jackie
Chan, Chris Tucker, Tom Wilkinson, Elizabeth Pena, Tzi Ma, Julia Hsu, Philip
Baker Hall.
"Rush Hour" is the kind of movie
I prefer to catch on television, rather than watch as a movie critic. This
is a very open-faced and easy to watch film, which would make it fun whilst
glancing up at the tube now and again in the middle of doing something else.
But it has too many little flaws and not enough meat for it to stand up as
a piece of cinema.
It's one of those action-comedy cop movies using
a plot which can be summarised with "One's a (whatever), one's a (whatever)."
In "Rush Hour", one's in the LAPD, one's a martial arts expert from the Hong
Kong police.
The LAPD member, played by Chris Tucker, is James
Carter, and unlike his presidential namesake, has a loud, irritating, disorderly
manner. Jackie Chan plays the other man, Detective Lee, who is brought to
the USA by old friend Consul Han (Tzi Ma), who hopes he can help the FBI
find his kidnapped daughter.
The FBI aren't happy about this, and so they give
Carter the job of babysitting him and making sure he doesn't get in the way.
Although neither man likes the other very much, nor do they like being swept
out of the way by the Feds, and so they team up, and take it upon themselves
to solve the case.
This is standard stuff, and you know what happens...
friendship develops, crime is solved, odious villain is killed in a grisly
manner. (Well, not too grisly a manner -- I said this film was open-faced
and easy to watch.)
What you'll want to know is if Tucker and Chan
are appealing enough to make the material work. Well my answer, not an amazingly
helpful one, is "sort of". Perhaps it would be a little more helpful to say
that "Rush Hour" is nowhere near as good as "Lethal Weapon", and nowhere
near as bad as "Beverly Hills Cop III".
Tucker is in good form, having learnt what Quentin
Tarantino taught him in the superb "Jackie Brown", which is that onscreen
stupidity is not funny, but the stupidity of the stupidity is. Chan handles
his role with class, and never embarrasses himself as the straight man standing
outside the demented nature of Tucker's character. Surprisingly, the joke
of the two not being able to understand each other very well doesn't wear
thin, and neither does a beauty of a scene where the two compare stories
about their brave daddies.
What does stretch believability is the growing
friendship between the two, because it doesn't grow, it springs up. As far
as I could see, one minute they're arguing in screams, then we cut away to
other characters, and when we're back with Chan and Tucker, they're suddenly
laughing and joking with each other.
Other problems... Well, it seemed rather annoying
that the writers couldn't justify plot turnings with more skill -- wild
situations are constantly erupting because the characters miss saying the
obvious things that would avoid them. For such a short film, 90 minutes in
fact, it takes far too long for anything interesting to happen. The inappropriate
music score often has the wrong tone and pace, matching the action very badly,
especially in the opening credits. And the film spends too much time on the
unimportant drama.
One more imperfection occurs to me. Even though
I'm usually against mindless violence in the movies, when you've got Jackie
Chan you don't waste him. His action scenes in "Rush Hour" weren't nearly
as showy as they could or should have been, nor are they played for big enough
laughs. They're not half as outrageous as usual, and as such, seem rather
bland.
The film itself seems rather bland. Save your
money in the cinema, and do as I advised in my opening paragraph -- see "Rush
Hour" on television. You won't notice the tedium as much as I did, and you'll
appreciate the good bits a lot more.
COPYRIGHT©
1998 Ian Waldron-Mantgani
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