If it wasn’t for Chris Tucker, I would have fallen straight to sleep in my chair by the time Jackie Chan opens his mouth to speak or starts to do his shtick. Nonetheless, RUSH HOUR 3 felt madly squeezed like a lemon without juice, and other than that, neither Jackie Chan’s karate-chops nor Chris Tucker’s motormouth helped the flick much. If you have seen this third (yawning) instalment, then you have seen it all, to be honest.


I wonder what Brett Ratner is on about these days. He needs a serious film to redeem himself, after what he had done to X-MEN: THE LAST STAND, he somehow tormented the series into something anti-climactic after his brilliant X-MEN 2. Now years later after the first RUSH HOUR film, they still managed to slice another franchise that’s totally plotless and clueless of its humour.


Save from Tucker dancing in the street as a traffic man, in tune to one of Prince’s song, which resulted to chaos on the road, was a tickle to the tummy and man, I laughed. Then the film carried on giving the audience a taste of what rubbish filmmaking is all about; Chan chasing an assassin, Tucker fighting the world’s tallest man, Chan and Tucker hitting with women, we think we’ve seen it all already. Nothing fresh, nothing vibrantly new, and they seemed to use Paris just as a backdrop for action scenes as the plot plodded along.


This must have resulted from the curse of “three-quels” over the summer, and a normal every-audience would surely agree that it suffered from its own pointlessness. Two cops chasing for a suspect of an assassination plot over to Paris seemed too forgettable and easily dumb for my standards. It felt like after watching the film, you wouldn’t really care at all if they catch the suspect or not, and apparently appalled when they started strutting at the end of the film. I never really understood as well (or was it really fully explained) what the hell was Chris Tucker’s character chasing a bad guy when his job only allows him to do some traffic control on a street. For goodness sake, as though I was that daft enough to miss such minimal things.


Unbearable, indeed. Chris Tucker might bring some laughs, with the “I’m Me, who are you?” - “I’m Yu.” sequence, but it’s entirely a bummer. There are movies that we can’t stand sitting the whole movie throughout, that’s the irony of it. If this is Hollywood doing the dawdling exercise of nonsensical films, that sad to say, the Hollywood filmmaking era is going definitely mad.


VERDICT:

One of summer’s worst movies. RUSH HOUR 3 felt like a squeezed material, plus the boring, nonsensical, plot. You might as well go to sleep as this will make your day better than this sloppy farcical flick. Cheers to Tucker for making me laugh; well at least once in every 40 minutes. That’s twice in the whole film.




RATING: D