Rush Hour 3 (2007)

Rush Hour 3 arrives as the third and weariest installment of a franchise built on a simple proposition: pair a Hong Kong policeman with a motormouthed Los Angeles detective and let the cultural friction do the heavy lifting. Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker return, and their interracial partnership remains the engine of the enterprise. Hiroyuki Sanada, Zhang Jingchu, Youki Kudoh and a small army of Parisian bit players fill out a cast that is genuinely varied by the standards of 2007 studio comedy. None of this is announced, explained, or congratulated. The diversity simply exists, which is either admirable or merely the natural consequence of casting a movie about Chinese triads and American cops. We shall record it as modest.

Race surfaces throughout, though never as a lesson. A Parisian cabbie delivers a lecture on American foreign policy, the film stages a Game of Death parody with the races of the combatants reversed, and the buddy banter leans on ethnic shorthand that a modern studio would approach with a lawyer present. The women fare worse. Geneviève exists to be imperiled and ogled, Jasmine is a dragon lady with a blade, and Soo Yung is a hostage with a father. The film has no interest in correcting any of this. It has interest in jokes.

What the picture lacks is any appetite for sermonizing. The villain is a corrupt individual, not a system, so the class critique never arrives. The climate does not appear. Bodies are mocked for their size in the traditional manner. No character is neurodivergent, no history is rewritten, no audience is scolded. The film wants only to move Chan and Tucker from one set piece to the next, and largely fails, but it fails without ever wagging a finger. As cultural artifacts go, this is a vintage of low ambition and low instruction. We score it accordingly, with the quiet gratitude of a man who has sat through far preachier nonsense.

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