'Rush Hour' - Action and comedy at full speed

When I was growing up, the “Rush Hour” series was one of my favorites to watch with my older sister. However, it had been some time since I watched the first movie, and I began to wonder if the 27-year-old movie is as good as I remembered. 

It is. 

In the movie, Chris Tucker plays a LAPD detective named Carter who is partnered with Jackie Chan’s Lee, a Hong Kong inspector. The two of them must find the Chinese consulate’s daughter after she has been kidnapped by a Chinese crime syndicate. 

Tucker and Chan have the best chemistry between the two main characters in a buddy-cop movie. Their ability to build off one another to bring comedy to a scene is amazing and would not work with two other actors. 

Tucker’s character brings a lot of verbal comedy with his line delivery and high-pitched voice. I feel that no other actor would be able to bring the same vibe to the character. 

Chan’s character brings more action and physical comedy. Jackie Chan will always be amazing at fight scenes and doing crazy stunts, but the subtle comedy he has when he is getting annoyed or tired is also excellent. 

One classic scene in this movie is when Carter teaches Lee how to dance, and Lee shows Carter how to disarm someone’s gun after they bond over both knowing the song “War” by Edwin Starr. Another classic scene happens in the first 30 minutes, when Lee pretends not to know English just to make life harder for Carter. 

However, the entire movie is not just one joke after another. The director of the movie wonderfully paced comedic bits between high-paced action sequences. 

The first half of the movie is about Lee trying to abandon Carter so he can go find the missing girl by himself, which leads to Jackie Chan doing multiple impressive stunts such as hanging on street signs, dropping onto moving vehicles and jumping from one car roof to another. 

The last 20 minutes of the film is when it hits its stride. This is when it finds the perfect balance between action and comedy.  

The arc of Lee and Carter’s friendship is amazing and reaches its perfect climactic conclusion by the end of the movie – but I won’t spoil how.  

One impressive thing you do not see in a lot of high-paced action movies is one of the main protagonists not using guns. While Tucker’s character Carter is quick to shoot his firearm, Jackie Chan’s character Lee scarcely, if ever, fires his weapon. 

Lee uses martial arts throughout the entire movie to take down the henchman. In one spot, he creatively throws the gun out of a window using a rug. The only true downside to this movie is the antagonists.  

While one of them is good for this movie genre, the other is uninspired and pointless. 

The main villain we see throughout the movie is Sung, who kidnaps the consulate’s daughter, negotiates the ransom, foils the cops trying to catch him and sets up the bombs at the end of the movie. He is a good bad guy for this type of movie. 

The other villain feels like a twist just for the sake of a twist. It is the consulate’s good friend Thomas Griffin. He apparently bought a lot of ancient Chinese artifacts off the black market, but had his shipment seized by the consulate and Lee’s operations back in Hong Kong before they left for Los Angeles.  

Griffin feels like he is just there to serve the purpose of funding the crime syndicate, but in a cinematic sense, he is just there for the surprise at the end. While it could be because I had seen the movie before, the shock nature of this turn is ineffective because they heavily hint that he is one of the bad guys throughout the movie. 

He completely disappears after the first 10 minutes and shows up again in the last 10 minutes. They refer to someone else helping Sung but never show who it is completely. 

However, we do see him through the security camera at one point, which clearly reveals who it is. 

While no movie is perfect, “Rush Hour” is still the standard for buddy-cop movies nearly 30 years later. The on-screen chemistry between Tucker and Chan helps turn this movie into one of the most beloved comedy franchises of all time.