Chan, Tucker kick their way past mediocrity

by Ron D'Orazio sports editor

The trailer for the movie "Rush Hour," advertised that the "fastest hands in the West meet the biggest mouth in the East."

This sets the tone for another buddy-cop action-flick. In this one, real-life karate hero and stunt man Jackie Chan plays a honored police officer from Hong Kong on the trail of a criminal who has kidnapped the daughter of a Chinese consulate. Chan follows the criminal and the consulate's daughter to the United States. There Chan meets a loud-mouth member of the Los Angeles police department, played by Chris Tucker.

The two officers set out to find the girl before she is killed, while trying not to kill each other in the process.

"Rush Hour" displays a routine actionfilm plot line and seems to try extra hard to make the chemistry between Tucker and Chan work. Basically, the chemistry starts to evolve after Tucker insults Chan in almost every line. In fact, much of the movie script could be seen as an insult to a few different groups of people, namely police officers and Asian-Americans.

Chan and the consulate, portrayed as law heroes in the movie's Hong Kong scenes, are made out to be incompetent in their jobs once they reach the U.S. From not being able to speak English to not understanding "American" police work, Chan and the consulate are ridiculed from the moment they step off their planes.

For most of the film, Chan and the consulate come off as morons in the knowledge of American culture. The police officers and the Federal Bureau of Investigators are shown as morons in the area of law enforcement and negotiation. The writers did not seem to miss anybody.

A good portion of the film is rescued by Chan's extraordinary stunt work and dizzying martial arts maneuvers, which provide much of the action for the film. Tucker's body language and some of his wise-cracks provide a source of comic relief during the course of the drawn-out attempt at the officers' chemistry.

Finally, when all is almost said and done, Tucker teaches his form of dancing to Chan while Chan shows Tucker some of the arts of combat.

Aside from some shoddy and insultplagued script writing, "Rush Hour" is above-average for its genre thanks to Chan's karate maneuvers and some hilarious bits by Tucker. However, if Hollywood is going to continue the buddy-cop flicks, they may want go a different route than they did in "Rush Hour".

"Rush Hour" garners a rating of two-anda-half stars out of four.