Film review: Rush Hour 2

An enjoyable alternative to a summer of disappointments

Gleaning humor from bigotry is always a risky proposition. When it’s done well, as in Blazing Saddles, it offends everybody. When it’s done poorly, as in As Good As It Gets, it’s played for cute. Jack Nicholson’s performance may have been phenomenal, but the fact that we’re supposed to laugh when he calls his housekeeper a "wetback" made more than a few bottoms squirm in their seats.

Chris Tucker’s nonstop crass commentary about all things Asian in Rush Hour 2 falls largely in the latter category. Granted, he doesn’t use the kind of slurs that recently got The Conan O’Brien Show into trouble, but Tucker definitely takes the term "ugly American" to a whole new level. From the minute his character, LAPD detective James L. Carter, arrives in Hong Kong to visit his friend Detective Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan), he’s a font of offensive observations, telling the Chinese Lee that he’ll "bitch-slap his ass back to Bangkok [Thailand]" and asking him how long it’s been since he "hid the rainbow roll" – a Japanese sushi dish. He even mistakenly hits Lee in a brawl, complaining, "All y’all look alike."

Granted, Tucker delivered similar less-than-diplomatic quips in 1998’s Rush Hour. There was, however, one crucial difference – those jokes were funny. Considering he received a whopping $20 million to reprise his chatterbox cop, you’d think the talented comic would at least try to earn his eight-figure-paycheck. But here, he seems content to slum it, doing a lame re-hash of his usual high-pitched stick, which, four years later, doesn’t nearly seem as fresh (although it’s a welcome respite from Martin Lawrence’s inchoate ramblings).

Luckily, Chan picks up the slack, rescuing Rush Hour 2 from becoming a Speed 2-like boatwreck. (This isn’t such a strange comparison, given that hack-scribe Jeff Nathanson wrote the scripts for both.) The 47-year-old action star is beginning to show his age – don’t expect any Police Story-scale car chases or Project A-style falls from multistory buildings.

Okay, there are two of those, but neither comes close to Chan’s former glory, since both use blue-screen effect and fake backgrounds. But when it comes to brawling, Chan remains an expert of hand-to-hand combat, battering opponents with a wastebasket in a Hong Kong massage parlor and displaying an inventive exit method through the gate of a Vegas casino cash-counting room.

The story flits between these locales, beginning in the Chinese port city with Lee hot on the trail of corrupt ex-cop Ricky Tan (the perfectly preserved John Lone) and his gorgeous henchwoman Hu Li (Crouching Tiger’s Zhang Ziyi). Apparently the photogenic pair is mixed up in an elaborate counterfeiting scheme with Los Angeles real estate magnate Steven Reign (Borscht-belt veteran Alan King), whose alluring lady friend Isabella (ex-soap star Roselyn Sanchez) may or may not be a Secret Service agent.

Tucker’s Carter, however, cares about none of this – he’s just trying to get some "moo shoo" (read: sex) from all the fly, fly Asian girls he meets. This leads to numerous semi-amusing situations where he loudly reads phrases like "Please shave my butt with a Samurai sword" from his Cantonese phrasebook, which is perhaps the most poorly-written language aid since the Monty Phython Hungarian-English dictionary. Far funnier are Carter’s Stateside antics, particularly a prolonged anti-racism tirade he gives at a craps table to distract the casino’s security from Lee. "This one’s for Nelson Mandela!" he screams, before shooting craps.

Such statements might seem ironic coming from the mouth of a culturally insensitive clod, but Rush Hour 2 does manage to dash the occasional stereotype. In an uncredited cameo, Don Cheadle shows up as the owner of a South-Central L.A. Chinese restaurant who do not only speaks fluent Cantonese, but is also trained with the brother of Lee’s kung-fu master.

And, unlike Replacement Killers, Anna and the King, Romeo Must Die, and Kiss of the Dragon, here the Asian leading man gets the girl. Although it’s just a chaste smooch, Jackie’s brief lip-lock with the luscious Sanchez is still a step forward. That, and the hilarious outtakes during the end credits (a staple of Chan movies) make Rush Hour 2 an enjoyable alternative in a summer of disappointments.