.: Roberts' Reviews - Movie Reviews :.

A film like Rush Hour 3 reveals the monotonies of film criticism. Not only do I have to sit through them as they go through the motions, but I also have to write about them. I'd like to think that film criticism is more than simply going through a checklist of reasons why a film is good or bad. I think it's a sharing of experience, of knowledge passed from one viewer to the next. Certainly not everyone sees Apocolypto from a Marxist perspective or uses Plato to humiliate Scary Movie 4, and not everyone has to. Yes, reviews must take some sort of subjective standpoint, and when stripped to their very basics come down to whether or not the writer liked what they saw. However, great reviews are about making an argument, sharing an opinion which is based on a personal belief or experience. The great critics of film history are considered so because they made us feel as though they were writing about something greater than their subject. Jean Renoir once wrote that the songwriter is usually greater than what he is singing about, and therefore, in a small way these critics were going outside of the film and instead sharing a piece of themselves.
So where does that leave me with a film like Rush Hour 3? How do I engage a reader while left to the task of writing about a film I care next to nothing about? By going through the motions of simple blockbuster filmmaking, Rush Hour 3 has left me with nothing else but to go through the motions of simple film criticism: it's not bad enough to dream up clever ways of dancing on its grave and not good enough to inspire optimism; it's just kind of there. To top it all off I must write under the dreaded fog of knowing how audiences consume films like this. Those who want to see Rush Hour 3 will probably enjoy it while it lasts, it certainly is competent enough to inspire that sentiment, and those who don't will know enough to go see something better. I guess knowledge really is pain.
Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan reprise their roles as partners Detective James Carter and Inspector Lee respectively. It may be safe to assume that the two stars needed the money. In the eight years of downtime that have elapsed between the three films Tucker (who was once a promising comic action hero) hasn't played a single other role (although some argue he has simply made a career of regurgitation variations of Smokey, his most famous role from the cult hit Friday anyway), and Chan, now 53 is slowing down in his old age and it shows. Rush Hour 3 has none of the intricate stunts and prop-inspired martial arts that we have come to love about Chan. His next film will be the animated Kung Fu Panda.
The plot involves an assassination attempt on Lee's employer and old friend Ambassador Han. This sends Carter and Lee to Paris in order to uncover the secret society that tried to kill Han and is fronted by Lee's estranged brother Kenji. Max von Sydow, the regular star of the late, great Swedish genius Ingmar Bergman, also has a role so small it makes us remember that villains can be predicted before the first act is up because no star is ever cast in a useless role. Although the great actor Phillip Baker Hall does appear for one useless scene as the captain of the NYPD, making us wish we were instead watching his show stopping performances in films like Secret Honor and my pick for the single best film of the 90s, Magnolia.
Along the way the duo also meet a French cab driver who begins the journey hating Americans for all the senseless violence and death they cause, until Carter convinces him that he is an American spy, and drives them through an improbable high-speed chase in which, through circumstances not even worth trying to describe, is driven on its two right wheels for so long that even Newton would grasp his forehead in embarrassment. And let's not forget that moment in which Kenji and Lee are hanging from a safety net attached to the Eiffel Tower and all logic melts away. If I was hanging on an unstable net, attached to the Eiffel Tower, I wouldn't have time for an emotional exchange between a former companion; I'd be getting the hell out of there and going back to the hotel to change my pants. Why can't we ever see that scene in an action film?
This film, like the previous two, was directed by Brett Ratner who, like his godfather Michael Bay, takes a lot of condemnation for directing mindless entertainments (although for the record, I thought his X-Men 3 was a slight improvement over its predecessors), which he does, but with a certain degree of skill and good humor no less. Yet, as a man who has made films like this so many times that he could craft them in his sleep (Money Talks, After the Sunset) it feels as though Ratner is stuck treading water while his contemporaries have swam out to the deep end. Rush Hour 3 is a competent film, well made, enlivened by the presence of its stars, and wholly forgettable; its inspiration never exceeding a desire to be stuck on autopilot. Even worse is that, in a summer that has housed such lively and enjoyable action films like Live Free or Die Hard, Transformers and the Bourne Ultimatum, Rush Hour 3 should feel embarrassed to show its face in the same theaters.