Not having seen either of the first two Rush Hour movies, I can’t comment on what seems to be the general opinion: that Rush Hour III is less funny, less action-packed and generally less enjoyable than they were. What I can say is that Rush Hour III is not funny, the action is dull and it’s not enjoyable at all.
The franchise pairs ageing Hong Kong martial-arts star Jackie Chan with American comedian Chris Tucker. This story, in which they battle Chinese triad gangsters, takes them from the United States to Paris. There they end up having a climactic battle with some evil Chinese people on the Eiffel Tower, by night nogal. That’s a fun idea, but it doesn’t play very enticingly. Like most of the movie, the action is basic and cartoony — violence for kids. There’s no blood, and when people get shot they conveniently fall out of the frame. When they die by falling a great distance, they land on or in some small building that naturally hides the mangled corpse.
The action does not so much flow as jolt uncomfortably from chase to fight to chase to fight, with regular halts for someone to backfill the plot-points — oh, right, so that’s what was going on. Thanks for explaining. At least one can go to the toilet at such moments, because they don’t really help make sense of the story.
Chan is not so much wooden as unable to transmit anything, let alone a joke, and Tucker is deeply annoying. He’s got a whining voice and a generally irksome manner; this, I imagine, is going as his comic style. His effeminate cowardice is counterbalanced by a lot of heterosexual lustfulness, so we’re not in any danger of thinking him less of a man, but his endless eye-rolling and high-pitched moaning is enough to give one a migraine. How he ever became a big star is a mystery to rival that of how the aliens built the pyramids.
The only funny moment in the movie is one particular car-chase stunt. Otherwise Rush Hour III strains to be amusing and fails. An example of such strain would be when Roman Polanski, no doubt slumming it for the money, turns up as a French policeman. His role is proctological — and he later gets his comeuppance for sticking a finger up Chan’s and Tucker’s bums. You’d have thought that simply having to do that was punishment enough.