![]() ![]() French newcomer Noemie Lenoir plays Genevieve, a Folies-Bergère showgirl who may be involved with the Triads, and aside from being a stunning-looking tall drink of water, she has a grave air of mystery about her that adds some elegance to this wobbly picture. There are other pleasant surprises in "Rush Hour 3": The Israeli-born, France-based actor Ivan Attal shows up as an American-hating French cabdriver who has a startling epiphany. The gag barrels forward, growing more absurd and more tangled, and even though Ratner doesn't seem to have much of a gift for harnessing his actors' timing, the sequence survives his clumsiness. She listens to him spit and sputter and tells Carter, in measured tones, that "he used the 'N' word." Carter responds by urging her to tell the guy he's "a piece of 'S'" - and so on. The only problem is, the gangster speaks just French, and the one available French speaker is a nun, Sister Agnes (played with marvelous, beatific élan by Dana Ivey), whose eyebrows get a workout in response to the guy's gutter mouth. In Los Angeles, where the story opens, Chan and Lee capture an Asian gangster who has come to the hospital where the wounded Chinese ambassador is recuperating, hoping to finish him off. Still, thanks to Muro, it all looks OK, and even the script has a few surprising jolts. The movie's climactic sequence takes place at the Eiffel Tower, and that, if Ratner actually knew where to put the camera to capture the action cleanly, would certainly be something to watch. Their search takes them to - where else? - Paris, that hotbed of Triad activity. Michael Muro.) The story, if it matters, has detectives Carter (Tucker) and Lee (Chan) searching Los Angeles for the Triad bigwigs who've ordered a (failed) assassination attempt on a Chinese ambassador (Tzi Ma). (It was shot, partly on location in Paris, by J. ![]() There were moments when I found myself laughing giddily at the inanity of it all, and other moments when the picture was so lavish and beautiful to look at that I almost forgot its faults. There's no doubt that "Rush Hour 3" is anything but a mess. Whatever rapport they have comes through mostly in the movie's outtakes - which are both a "Rush Hour" and a Jackie Chan-movie tradition, shown alongside the movie's closing credits - particularly in the way Chan can always crack Tucker up with his goofily poetic malapropisms. Sometimes they barely seem to inhabit the same movie. The curious thing about "Rush Hour 3" is that it makes you doubt the central equation of that formula to begin with: Tucker and his costar, Jackie Chan, have almost no chemistry. That's a lot of shekels, so you can understand why Ratner and screenwriter Jeff Nathanson (who also wrote "Rush Hour 2") wouldn't want to stray too far from an already-successful formula. Together, the 1998 "Rush Hour" and the 2001 "Rush Hour 2," both directed by Ratner, made nearly $600 million worldwide. (It kicks off with the explosive declaration "I am Yu!") I wish "Rush Hour 3" were better, but I'll grant director Brett Ratner this much: He knows that homage isn't a kind of cheese. "Rush Hour 3" even dares to recycle, with obvious affection, an old Abbott and Costello gag. Exactly what is going on here? I'm still not sure, but when Roman Polanski shows up, as a disheveled, tweedy French police inspector who specializes in anal-cavity searches, he's like a walking in joke: Either you know who he is or you don't, but the movie is a little bit funnier, and a little bit stranger, if you do. ![]() One minute Chris Tucker is cracking lame Ex-Lax jokes the next, Max von Sydow - as an absurdly dignified dignitary - is classing up the joint with his stately jowls. It's also, in places, weirdly brilliant, a picture that plays to the largest possible audience with mechanical efficiency but also, here and there, betrays glimmers of self-deprecating cleverness, as if it were striving, perhaps even unconsciously, to transcend its own dumbness. "Rush Hour 3" is crass, stupid and crudely made. ![]()
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