“Brings Joy”: Why Rush Hour is my feel-good film | Jackie Chan

TIt’s often the case that Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy” is playing at a supermarket or CVS and all I can think about is “Rush Hour.” The year is 1997, and in the backseat of a car, the Chinese consul’s daughter, Soo-yung (played by 11-year-old Julia Hsu), is dreaming up sweet fantasies only possible in a Mariah song, with hers wading through Los Angeles traffic with stone-faced bodyguards at the front. For me, as a 10-year-old singing with similar power about heartbreak and longing in front of her immigrant parents, it was a quintessentially American moment. You can see pure joy on Soo-yung’s face before we move on to the big scene where the car is pulled to the side. A police car swings in front of them and a man gets out, boldly shoots the bodyguards and kidnaps Soo-yung.

And that’s where the core of the plot of this 1998 action comedy comes into play. For the mission “Save the Daughter of an Important Person,” director Brett Ratner offers us Hong Kong actors Jackie Chan (who had since gained fame in the USA with “Rumble in the Bronx”) and Chris Tucker (who was already known for “House”) ) on Party 3 and Friday) to save the day.

Chan plays Chief Inspector Lee, a tough Hong Kong detective who travels to the United States for the first time to find his friend the consul’s daughter, while Tucker plays James Carter, a black officer who ignores rules, speaks well and The LAPD has ambitions that go beyond this – “the most hated police officers in the entire free world.” “My own mom is ashamed of me,” says Carter. Each man approaches the other with preconceived notions: Carter speaks loudly, hoping it will help Lee understand English better, while Lee looks at him with a calm smile, assuming the American is just talking and elaborating. Each man believes he is the right person to solve this case, whether because of personal connections or street smarts.

Over the course of the film, the two overdo each other with stereotypes that might seem tiring to watch now if you weren’t introduced to feel-good films at a young age. But Lee and Carter inadvertently become a charming underdog duo, evading the FBI agents on the case (who the two find annoying due to their own complacency).

They stumble through Los Angeles – from a poker game in a bar to an abandoned building that explodes to the Foo Chow restaurant in Chinatown – and encounter Soo-yung’s captors, led by Sang, the top subordinate, who has a perfect and creepy look Substitute – attack villain. With a bleach-blonde shaved head, a lanky body, and a scar from Soo-yung slamming the necklace under her eye when she was kidnapped, Sang brings the energy of having just finished a cigarette before body crushed with the foot. Despite his generally cold disposition, at one point he points a gun at Lee (whom he’s met before in Hong Kong), with barely controlled rage, adrenaline just under his skin, eager to be unleashed.

As Lee and Carter begin finding clues together and supporting each other in fights, the insults they hurl petulantly become an extension of familiarity and friendship (my cousin and I made up lines as kids that we… admittedly barely understood – “) I’m Michael Jackson, you’re Tito,” I shouted at him during a handball game. As the two fight Sang’s henchmen, a martial arts combination occurs that resembles an elaborate handshake between two brothers. As they eat eel and “camel hump,” they swap stories about their police officer fathers, who they see as heroes. Here “Rush Hour” picks up on something that touched me then and now: a lightness spreads through the two actors, Chan and Tucker’s happiness feels so authentic that the East-West tropes develop into characters about something real, and they also have fun (so much so that the bloopers of Rush Hour and its sequels have been viewed 19 million times).

There’s plenty of sexism throughout, and Ratner has since faced horrific assault allegations that warrant careful criticism and scrutiny. But when it comes to the final showdown at an art exhibition organized by the consul, “Rush Hour” delivers for me what a feel-good film should be: a simplification of the world in a way that brings joy, a specificity that makes it seem real scenes that will stay with you forever. As Lee and Carter explore the Foo Chow restaurant, one of Sang’s bases, Carter plays Edwin Starr’s “War” in the car. There’s something strangely comforting about Lee singing “War, good God / You all” before a horrified Carter teaches him how to pronounce “y’all.” There is no deeper meaning except that perhaps by not taking themselves so seriously they find the space to be something else.