Film Clips	Rush Hour 3 by M. Faust

If someone asked me to make a list of the top 10 movie stars (as opposed to actors) of all time, there’s no question Jackie Chan would be on the list. At his best, in the films Chan made as a performer and often director in Hong Kong in the 1980s and early 1990s, Chan was nothing short of astonishing, executing intricately conceived stunts with a daredevil fearlessness (some might say foolishness). But he’s well past his peak: Now in his early 50s, his body simply can’t take the demands he used to make on it. I wish he would use his talents to devise action sequences for younger actors to perform, and maybe that’s his plan—it would be the one good excuse he could have for chasing big paychecks in the third-rate vehicles Hollywood has been devising for him. But even worse than watching him in scenes where multiple cameras and editing substitute illusion for the reality of what he used to be able to do is seeing him play second banana to the scene hogging of Chris Tucker in the Rush Hour movies, of which this is the third and hopefully last. Chan is on record as having criticized Tucker for demanding final editing rights to this film, for which he was paid an unbelievable $25 million. (As a screen team, they have no chemistry whatsoever.) Tucker’s salary apparently didn’t leave anything left in the budget to pay a writer, as the script here is the barest skeleton on which to hang a series of generic mayhem sequences and comic schtick, most of which would have been rejected by Jerry Lewis at his most drug-debilitated. Give director Bret Ratner credit for making Paris, where much of this takes place, look sleek and sophisticated, and for putting a terrific Serge Gainsbourg song on the soundtrack. But everything else lowers the bar for lowest common denominator: The film’s one good joke—Tucker and Chan mooning separately after a spat through the streets to the strains of Elton John’s ridiculously melodramatic (in this context at least) “Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word”—barely raised a sound from a preview audience that roared at Tucker’s mugging. It’s a movie that has so little regard for its audience that it actually expects us to be surprised when co-star Max von Sydow is revealed to be a villain. (He’s Max von Sydow, fer cryin’ out loud—why else would you cast him?) And can anyone explain what Roman Polanski of all people is doing here, in a cameo as a Paris detective who dons a rubber glove to welcome our heroes at customs?

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