In the words of Sheryl Crowe herself: a change will do you good. Whether she’s was talking about lifestyle alterations, or merely the swapping of one’s pants, the message is clear: diversity is good. If only somebody would tell cinema goers that. Take Rush Hour as a case in hand: $130 million in the bank over in the States, it also topped the UK charts for four weeks over Christmas ’98. A cast-iron case of audiences sticking with what they know if ever there was one.

Indeed, Rush Hour's attempts to give artificial respiration to the buddy movie genre proved so profitable that a sequel was kick-started into action more months after this one had hit auditoriums. Great. Or it would be, had Rush Hour not been such a hideously unfunny, misjudged, borderline racist piece of derivative trash.

The serviceable plot (for it really does just serve as a basis to showcase the manic energy of its leading men) has Jackie Chan, as Detective Inspector Lee, who is summoned from Hong Kong to LA after the city's US consul discovers his daughter has been kidnapped by Oriental crimelords. The FBI, however, far from keen to land themselves in a diplomatic pickle if harm should befall the new arrival, employs the services of LAPD (yep, you guessed it) loose cannon James Carter (Chris Tucker) to keep Lee as far away from the case as possible. It's a scheme that swiftly hurtles out of control; Lee is determined to crack the case, while Carter, pained with his babysitting gig, has his own plans to rescue the kidnapped tyke.

So that's 48 Hours meets Coming To America meets Lethal Weapon with a slight aftertaste of Alien Nation. The set-up is so ridiculously simple that the least you'd expect is for Rush Hour to get swiftly down to business.

But no. Despite its title, Rush Hour takes 45 minutes to get going, devoting the entire first half to Tucker's love-it-or-hate-it Eddie Murphy shtick (hint: it’s the latter). Given that Tucker has about as much appeal as dried up vomit in the first place, to grant an extortionate amount of screen time to his irritating Michael Jackson impersonations is purely unforgivable on director Brett Ratner’s part. Chan, try as he might to save the day with his fish out of water shtick, fails to imbue anything in the way of gleeful innocence, even if he does go some way in counter-balancing Tucker's idiot behaviour. To be honest, you know you’re onto something pretty lame when the professionally irritating Tucker starts yelling things like, "I've been lookin' for your sweet and sour chicken *ss!". Please stop.

Okay, so the script is pretty awful, which is not necessarily always a death knoll. But the fact that the film is a terminally dull affair is entirely the fault of neither star not screenwriter. The buck stops with Ratner in that respect. Clearly out of his depth when it comes to handling action sequences, Ratner manages to achieve the impossible by making Chan’s fighting look positively cack. To bring about a complete balls-up of what on paper would appear to be Rush Hour’s guaranteed crowd-pleaser is almost admirable in a weird kind of way, simply because no one has ever made Chan – universally famed for his blistering, balletic brand of action - look as fragile as he does here. It’s almost as if the great one has been told, “Move slower, so the mainstream audience can keep up with you”. It is also testament to Ratner's woeful lack of judgement that a tense bomb disposal sequence is apathetically rushed in order to allow more screen-time for Tucker's perpetual jive tomfoolery.

Of course, when the film attempts to be even slightly moralistic, Ratner simply ignores this element completely: Little mileage is gleaned from an initially interesting culture issue far too early on in the film, save a ludicrous scene in which we are to believe that an LA cop has never eaten Chinese food until teamed with a Chinese partner - for the sake of a gag. Surely somebody, at one stage or another, would have realised that the film was full of holes bigger than the Grand Canyon. You’d think, wouldn’t you, you naïve fools?

Throw in a very poorly realised subplot about British rule in Hong Kong as a means to bulk up the story (when they should instead have been thinking of some interesting stunts for Chan, who deserves better than this form of humiliation) and what you’re left with is a film – thanks to being as brainless as they come, packed with thankless and extremely empty support roles, an appalling script, an entirely predictable outcome (have you ever seen an ending in which the villain's caseful of money opens, raining dollar bills everywhere? Thought so) and a lethally ineffective director – that is an absolute embarrassment. You know how low things have sunk when the outtakes which accompany the end credits are better than what goes before.

And, yes, they are making a third one. Please, I'm begging all you people out there, don't fall into the same trap yet again.


Recommended:
No

Viewing Format: VHS
Video Occasion: None of the Above
Suitability For Children: Suitable for Children Age 13 and Older