Ahoy, squirts! Quint here.

RUSH HOUR 3 is fucking retarded.

The majority of the jokes are so old and worn that you almost can’t believe they’re doing it. Did they really just do another version of Who’s On First? Did they really just do a fried chicken joke? Did Jackie Chan speak ebonics again? Hey look, that Frenchman hates America!

Yes. The movie is retarded. It is the textbook example of big dumb studio comedy.

But it is a RUSH HOUR movie.

If you liked any of the previous installments, you’ll like this one, too. I couldn’t help but laugh a couple times. Yeah, the jokes are almost all stale, but the film does have a sort of infectious energy, propelled by Chan and Tucker’s chemistry.

I’m not giving this movie a pass… I know it started out like one of those reviews where the writer sits back and goes, “I know! I’ll trick ‘em into thinking I hated it, then I’ll pull out the big surprise!”

I don’t think the film is particularly well done. I wouldn’t recommend it to a discerning film-goer. There are much better comedies that have come out this year and are still coming out. HOT ROD is much better than RUSH HOUR 3. SUPERBAD is miles better then RH3. ROCKET SCIENCE is also better.

But the audience ate this movie up. They loved it. Applause, uproarious laughter, the whole bit.

And there are good scenes in this movie. In particular, there’s a bit with a nun translating the French insults directed at Tucker and Chan, and then translating their vulgar insults right back.

Then there’s George, the French cab driver. I won’t tell you his arc in case you do decide to catch the flick, but Yvan Attal (you might have seen him in MUNICH) steals the movie. He was the crowd’s favorite character and they also do some interesting change-ups with the tired America-hating Frenchman cliché. If there is another RUSH HOUR movie, I bet you there’ll be a big demand for this guy to show up somewhere.

And then there is one thing in the film, one particular piece of “Oh, my God… they’re not… fuck me, they did…” craziness. This piece of work almost makes me want to give this a full recommendation.

So, we all know by now that Roman Polanski has a cameo. He plays a French police captain who detains Carter and Lee at the airport upon their arrival in Paris.

I kid you not… they make not one, but two jokes about him anally raping Chan and Tucker. I am not fucking kidding. Chan, at one point, literally tells him, “My butt still hurts.”

I was flabbergasted. Absolutely speechless when that happened. I was like, “Did Polanski know what they were talking about? Did he understand? Was he in on the joke? If not, that’s really fucked up. If so, that’s ten times more fucked up!”

So, it’s almost worth sitting through the 80% of the movie that we’ve seen before, copied from better movies, just to see the enormous balls of that one particular wink and nod.

The plot… who cares? It’s as predictable as it comes. If you don’t know who the bad guy is in the first 5 minutes of the movie then you’ve never seen a film before. From the casting to the introduction of the character. You know who the bad guy is and you’re just waiting for the movie to catch up with you.

So, yeah. The movie is just as retarded as the rest, but on a bigger scale. I actually liked a lot of the first RUSH HOUR movie, but something’s happened to Chris Tucker. He’s trying his best and sometimes he succeeds, but it felt like his timing was off. He felt more like a caricature of a funnyman than an actual funnyman.

Chan still gives everything his all. Good for him. It’s always a pleasure to see him on the screen.

Ratner… I won’t harp on the guy. He gets plenty of that without my input. The man knows how to cut together a film, knows how to keep the pace up, keep the movie flowing. It’s his personal fetishes that get in the way and they’re all on display here. Well, maybe not all of them, but a significant amount.

There are my thoughts upon immediately exiting the theater. I still can’t get over Polanski snapping on that rubber glove at the airport… with a smirk. I can’t believe that. Maybe I dreamed it? Surely they didn’t do that for real, right?

-Quint
quint@aintitcool.com