I don’t think many would put Rush Hour as their number one movie in the buddy cop genre. However, for a certain age group (let’s say those 90’s millennial babies—I’m one of them), I do think Rush Hour is up there with Bad Boys if you ask someone to say the first movie that comes to mind when you think of that genre. Oftentimes, it does for me. In a few months, Rush Hour will be 25 years old, and it’s a good time to revisit it.
THE STORY: Chief Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) is one of Hong Kong’s finest officers and has just come off of recovering numerous Chinese artifacts. It is a great parting gift to the partners he works for in Consul Solon Han (Tzi Ma) and British diplomat Thomas Griffin (Tom Wilkinson). The former is departing for America serving as a diplomat in Los Angeles with daughter Soon-Yun (Julia Hsu), who considers Lee a best friend of sorts.
In Los Angeles is Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) of the LAPD. Carter runs hot, talks fast, and typically causes a lot of collateral damage as he gets the job done sans a partner. On the verge of suspension (unbeknownst to him), Carter is put on a special “G14 classified” assignment, tagged by the FBI through the LAPD to babysit. His assignment? Escorting Lee through Los Angeles and keeping him away from the case. Soon-Yun has been kidnapped, and the FBI is reluctant to involve Lee despite the want of Consul Han. Two vastly different people, Lee and Carter struggle to find common ground, but through time, they slowly bond over their shared experiences being excluded and start to build momentum in rescuing Soon-Yun.
WHAT TO LOOK FOR: Let’s get right into it. Rush Hour hasn’t aged the greatest in a few areas. Some of the humor would never fly today, and though this humor never feels malicious, some of the lines feel extremely unnecessary (“Mr. Rice-a-Roni,” “Sweet-and-Sour chicken a**”) and never were funny in the first place. Director Brett Ratner, who’s movies used to print healthy box office returns, has succumbed to numerous sexual assault allegations and hasn’t produced anything since 2019, much less directed a feature since 2014. But as a collective whole, Rush Hour holds up, and remains one of the quintessential TV movies of all time.
At a brisk one hour and thirty-eight minutes, Rush Hour moves. On further rewatches, maybe a bit too quickly and its story unravels more out of happenstance (how do low level LA criminals know what’s happening with a high level international crime syndicate?) than clever plotting. But you can’t get too mad, as the film doesn’t overstay its welcome, nor does it suffer from the problem so many comedies in the mid 2000’s-onward fall victim to in a dragged-out final act. Rush Hour doesn’t hide its Asian/Black dynamic, yet at the end of the day it really is a simple story of two people from divergent backgrounds who happen to have been discarded who end up becoming tight, irregardless of race/upbringing. Outside of the comedy, there isn’t one spectacular set-piece, but a few smaller ones that highlight the practicality and martial arts expertise of Chan in his prime.
Not a shocker, but Rush Hour still holds because of the effervescent chemistry of Chan and Tucker. It’s hard to imagine a Mount Rushmore of buddy cops that doesn’t have this duo on it. The manic energy of Tucker plays off well with the steady and more stoic persona of Chan. But what goes unmentioned is how each was able to flip their approach when a scene calls for it. For Chan, he’s unafraid to look goofy, and for Tucker, no one is going to mistake him for an amazing dramatic actor, but in the few times where he needed to tamp down the bluster, he did well with providing some pathos.
Another underrated aspect of this film (and Rush Hour 2 to a smaller extent) is the sneaky hilarity of a handful of supporting characters. Most play it straight as almost all interact with Tucker at least once, but Mark Rolston, Rex Linn, Philip Baker Hall, Elizabeth Peña, Clifton Powell, Barry Shabaka Henley, John Hawkes, and Chris Penn all get at least one or two moments to secure a laugh.
A GREAT MOMENT: The “War” montage almost got the nod here, as it’s the moment in the movie where Lee and Carter form a friendlier bond. But going with…the pre end-credit bloopers. In a little over three minutes, it is clear to see that the relationship on display between Chan and Tucker was legitimate chemistry that would be able to carry another movie with ease (let’s all forget about the 3rd installment). Even as Chan would routinely say he didn’t particularly like these movies, he’s always had nothing but strong things to say about Tucker after a bumpy start, stating that the funnyman helped him learn English and seeing the domestic success of the film helped him to contextualize the differences in humor between a Chinese audience and an American audience.
THE TALLY: No matter what, Rush Hour can at least say it started a major change (for better and worse) in movie review aggregation, single handedly creating Rotten Tomatoes. From a legacy perspective, while the buddy cop subgenre it belongs in has long evolved from an exact template to more of a concept, Rush Hour still holds a high up spot in the traditional subgenre mold. It’s What to Watch, and it is currently streaming (as of this writing) on Max.