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August 21, 2007

Rush Hour 3 an Insulting Waste of Time

For those who don't know, I am a big-time fan of Jackie Chan. I'm pretty sure I've seen all his movies at least once, and some probably twenty or thirty times. I have a big collection of his movies, too. So I have been very anxious to see Rush Hour 3. Well, last night was the big night. And the thing was such an obnoxious, insulting, trite, worthless piece of shit movie that I nearly walked out. The only thing that kept me in my seat until the end was the hope that maybe somewhere I'd get to see some classic Jackie Chan action. I left thinking it's time for Jackie to retire and whoever was involved in that script should be banned from every producing another movie again.

The groaning at the stupidity of the script, which far exceeds the silliness I've come to expect from Jackie Chan scripts, began in the first two minutes. By five minutes I was beginning to be concerned. The characters have always been funny and exaggerated, but this time they were caricatures of themselves – exaggerations of exaggerations.

Chris Tucker's character, who is supposed to be an air-head but a good guy, starts out using his position as a police officer to arrest two women in a traffic accident, handcuff them and bend them over the hood of the car in their very short skirts, check out their butts (you get to check them out, too), make fun of how fat one of them is, and then coerce them into meeting up later with him and Jackie for a "date." From there it's on to gratuitous sexual comments, gratuitous nudity, and gratuitous groping with his character putting the moves, in exaggerated and highly obnoxious form, on every female he sees throughout the entire movie. I have no problem with sex in movies, mind you, but this is crude, rude, and disrespectful to women so it made me mad. At no time do you believe he could ever get laid, at least not with any self-respecting woman, yet he bags the hottest chick in the film – well, almost.

And he gets worse from there. With Michael Vick in the news for dogfighting, you would think the producers would have sense enough to cut the scene in which he talks fondly about cockfighting and how his chicken fought with heart – and was very delicious, too.

But worse than the excessive ridiculousness of the characters was the fact that the movie was in its entirety one big insult to America. You start to get the picture when Jackie and Chris land in Paris and the cab driver doesn't want to give them a ride because Chris is an American. You see, he says, Americans are crazy and just kill people for no reason. Look at Viet Nam! Look at Iraq! They just want to kill everyone. Soon, however, the bad guys are after them and the cab driver is told to pretend he's a spy and get into the adventure of it all, at which point you see him begin to transform from a snotty French pansy into an "American spy" who is ready for adventure and looking for an opportunity to "kill people for no reason." His transformation is really one of the the primary points of the entire plot, with Chris Tucker's character providing the model of the typical American. Really, it was so insulting I was just fuming.

The good and evil, yin-yang theme is also present in this film, along with other symbolism, but it is so awkward and juvenile and bumbling that I can only think if Americans enjoy this film it is because they have sunk to such levels of mind-numbed ignorance that we are in a hopeless state and perhaps even deserving of such grotesque insults.

As for the action, it had its moments. You could fit the good stuff into a ten-minute clip. I'll sit through a lot of bad film-making to see good Jackie Chan moves, but I can tell you, this action was nowhere near good enough for me to waste the time sitting through Rush Hour 3 ever again.

Posted by Becky at August 21, 2007 09:15 AM