Rush Hour (New Line Cinema, Roger Birnbaum Productions, Warner Bros., 1998)

by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2025 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved

Last night (Sunday, September 28) there were a couple of films I wanted to watch. Turner Classic Movies was doing a “Silent Sunday Showcase” of a 1921 film called Too Wise Wives, which I was interested in partly because the director was Lois Weber – one of the pioneering women filmmakers in the early days and someone whom I’ve quite liked in her previous films – and partly because the male lead was the young Louis Calhern. Alas, the film wasn’t scheduled until 9:45 p.m. so I wanted something to fill in the time before it. The film I wanted to watch was the DVD of Rush Hour, a 1998 part police procedural, part comedy and part martial-arts film directed by Brett Ratner and co-starring Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker. I’d got interested in Rush Hour in a quirky way: when Charles and I did our day trip to Los Angeles a while back he insisted we eat lunch at the Foo Chow restaurant in L.A.’s Chinatown because it had been featured in this film. That immediately put Rush Hour on my list of films that I wanted to see sometime, and I ordered a DVD from Amazon.com that also included the two sequelae. Alas, Charles couldn’t join me for most of the film because he was working on an assignment for an online class in business management from Cerritos College, so he sat at the computer for most of the movie and missed a lot of Jackie Chan’s amazing martial-arts moves that are virtually the only reason anyone would want to watch this film. It was made in 1998, a year after the British government returned control of Hong Kong to the Chinese, which is a key element in the plot. Jackie Chan plays a Chinese detective named Lee of the Hong Kong Royal Police Force, who in the opening scene, set in Hong Kong harbor, is after a master criminal named Juntao. Lee is unable to find Juntao but does track down his second-in-command, Sang (Ken Leung), and retrieves a major stash of stolen Chinese art treasures. Alas, Sang escapes in a boat.

The scene then shifts to the actual hand-over of Hong Kong to China, headed by Chinese consul Solon Han (Tzi Ma) and British police commander Thomas Griffin (Tom Wilkinson). After the transfer of Hong Kong to Chinese sovereignty, Han is reassigned to staff the Chinese consulate in L.A. and brings his pre-pubescent daughter Soo Yung (Julia Hsu) with him. Alas, agents of Juntao kidnap the girl in a chilling sequence in which two young Asian men disguised as L.A. police officers ambush the car containing her, shoot her bodyguards, and then a man riding a motorcycle picks her up and takes her heaven knows where. The only clue we get as to why the film is called Rush Hour is when the two pretend cops answer Soo Yung’s chauffeur’s question as to why they’re being stopped. “It’s rush hour,” the mock cop says just before he kills the chauffeur and the other adult male in the car. The FBI agents called in on the case, Russ (Mark Rolston) and Whitney (Rex Linn), hear that the Chinese are sending in one of their own policemen to look for Soo Yung and decide they need to assign him a “babysitter.” Not wanting to waste one of their own agents for the job, they request someone from the Los Angeles Police Department, and the LAPD sends them Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker), a self-centered egomaniac who’s on the verge of being suspended and who refuses to work with a partner even though he’s been assigned one, a short-haired woman named Tania Johnson (Elizabeth Peña) with whom he either had or tried to have an affair (the signals from writers Ross LaManna and Jim Kouf are contradictory). Though Charles was too busy with his online course work to watch most of the movie with me, he instantly recognized Tucker’s character as a rehash of Eddie Murphy’s role in Beverly Hills Cop (1984) – a movie my late partner John Gabrish and I watched together and hated so much we nicknamed it Beverly Hills Crap. (The next night after John and I watched Beverly Hills Cop I showed him a VHS tape of Don Siegel’s 1968 film Madigan, with Richard Widmark and Henry Fonda, just to offer him an example of a good police procedural.)

Even before the main intrigue, we’ve seen Carter blow a major sting operation involving a crooked arms dealer and a trunk full of C4 explosive which resulted in the C4 detonating and wiping out an entire city block. Sang phones the Chinese consulate to issue his demand for Soo Yung’s safe return – $50 million in cash, later upped to $70 million after Carter’s antics blow the first proposed drop site at Foo Chow – and Carter picks up the call and of course makes an ass of himself. Frankly, one wonders why the owners and staff of Foo Chow make such a big deal of their association with Rush Hour, since the sequence involving the restaurant is 20 minutes long (out of a total 98-minute running time) and depicts it as having a secret upstairs room where the crooks hide out and from which they run their operations. The climax occurs at a major art exhibit in L.A.’s Chinatown sponsored by the consulate, and from the moment the consul announces that the items on display are priceless heirlooms from China’s entire recorded history, we just know that a lot of them are going to end up in smithereens by the time the film is over. There’s also a major surprise twist [spoiler alert!] in which Thomas Griffin, the British diplomat who oversaw the handover of Hong Kong to China in the opening scene, is the mysterious crime lord Juntao. His motive was that in his years in service to Her Majesty’s government he’d secretly been stealing and stashing $70 million worth of priceless Chinese art objects, only once Hong Kong was returned to China the two governments seized his entire collection and gave it back to the Chinese.

I might have enjoyed Rush Hour more if Charles had been able to watch it with me, but as it stands it’s an O.K. movie rather than a great one. Though Jackie Chan gets to show his agility in several scenes (including one in which Carter handcuffs Lee to the steering wheel of his fancy black Corvette sports car – and Lee gets away by stealing the entire steering wheel, forcing Carter to call a tow truck to move a car he can no longer drive), there aren’t any real martial-arts showpieces. It does contain an entertaining blooper reel shown during the closing credits – a Jackie Chan specialty. There’s also a fun scene in which Lee and Carter keep stealing each other’s guns, rather like Herbert Marshall and Miriam Hopkins pickpocketing each other in Ernst Lubitsch’s 1932 comedy masterpiece Trouble in Paradise, while in one scene Carter ends up holding the gun on himself and I couldn’t help thinking of Cleavon Little’s similar, but much funnier, scene in Mel Brooks’s Blazing Saddles, a movie that would be outrageously politically incorrect today because of its frequent use of the “N-word,” though as Brooks has pointed out, every time that word is used the joke is on the racist characters who take it all too seriously!