Rush Hour 2

The efficient, heartless Rush Hour 2 is the old buddy cop cliché out of juice and running on fucking fumes. It's the kind of flick that makes me wonder who made it and are they as ashamed of themselves as they should be. Probably not, because they can say "It made money," and that's all they care about. The makers are the sort of people who, if they hadn't been lucky enough to land cushy Hollywood gigs, would be pumping Amway or some other MLM product where the whole goal is to make fucking money at the expense of friendships and self-respect..

Really, shit like Rush Hour 2 is not about you or me laughing, or being entertained, or storytelling, or even remembering what the fuck we just saw. It's a piece of shit that the grassfuckers in Hollywood can't even believe is good, but believe they can sell.

Rush Hour 2's plot has the easy job of stringing together predetermined action sequences, and yet it manages to do it in a way that suggests the main characters are all retarded and incapable of making an obvious or correct choice--ever. Honestly, these fatty meatheads would be dead in the real world, or a script resembling reality. Most of the action occurs because Chris Tucker's character does things so fucking stupid it sets the NAACP 50 years. It's a $20 million dollar routine that white audiences are supposed to laugh at because this indiscreet, loud-mouthed black man mugs and moons like Amos'n'Andy. A black man as dumb and loud as this in the real world would be sent out for burgers and later found dead in a bathroom stall, choking on his own underwear.

There is an important rule at work in this movie: screenwriters cannot write characters smarter than themselves. A corollary is: lazy screenwriters don't even try. They just populate their worlds with props and shills who can push forward formulaic plots. A final corollary is: bad white screenwriters are deathly afraid to write an intelligent black man.

I won't bother detailing about the bottom-feeding plot; it doesn't deserve it. In, hong Kong, Tucker and Chan stumble across a gang counterfeiting a "superbill," a $100 phony so good most banks can't recognize it. Wherever the two of them go, first Hong Kong and then, conveniently, Las Vegas, they stumble upon obvious clues that several police forces can't seem to figure get. It's another crappy script where the explanation from scene to scene asks the viewer to believe that every fucking character is so stupid he spells out everything. It's the kind of movie where bad guys show their faces and then run away to generate chas scenes, where a normal person would hide right from the beginning. It's got yet another shitty loose-gun scramble, a sutffy U.S. officer-in-charge who gets his comeuppance, lots of people flying through windows.

All of the "comedy" is supposed to come from Chan and Tucker's culture-clash bickering. It's all just a rehash of the Lockhorns comic strip, only now the Lockhorns are racist assholes. The audience gets to hear grade-school-playground kneeslappers such as "All Asians look the same," "Asians have small dicks," "Asians eat dogs," and "Nobody can understand that crazy Chinese accent." Let's not forget the zany Tucker-mispronouncing-the Chinese-language-and-saying-something-slightly-naughty" joke . It's so nice, they repeat it ten or twelve times. And when the screenwriters run out of that "A" material, they repeat themselves with the compulsiveness of a retard who had his pen stolen at lunch. The jokes are almost entirely based on the assumption that other cultures are "crazy" and we Americans are the only sane people. Ha ha.

Did the writers think they were being funny or did they think "I wish I was dead?"

Chan and Tucker have no chemistry, just a string of racist insults to hurl. Insulting people is a staple of my existence. But when doing it to someone you love there has to be at least a strand of humanity, or some evidence that you don't really mean it. You have to show that you aren't just saying anything because you have no real understanding. But that level of subtlety requires the intellect of an unemployed gas-jockeys. Apparently these smug Hollywood pricks aren't that sharp.

But Rush Hour 2's cultural-clash shit isn't what makes it offensive. The fact that those LA assholes are trying to sell such stale gags is. And if Tucker talked to me the way he talked to Chan, I'd lose my patience and shit in his car while he wasn't looking. Even my drunk friends are less annoying. He has one speed and it's slightly faster, louder and more needy than Robin Williams. I can hardly wait until he gets enough clout to start making his "pet" dramatic projects.

Chan's in a constant state of confusion, lost by the heavy exposition he's asked to barf up and the ridiculous nonsense around him. His fight sequences are decent, but you'll see him do a hell of a lot better with a rental of Super Cop.

The biggest disappointment is the presence of the incredibly beautiful Zhang Ziyi. Why would she waste her time with this crap when she could be doing girl-on-girl porn? That's all I want. And if not porn, then how about a movie where she isn't asked to be a dull, speechless villain who only snarls and has a double come in to do the stunts? Who the fuck is managing her career, some agent who wasn't bright enough to be a writer?

One Fucking Finger for the latest can of generic Hollywood crap. Don't buy it, don't buy into it, and don't let your neighbors try to rope you in. It's a fucking scam.