The Rush Hour franchise created one of the quintessential buddy comedy duos of the ‘90s and early 2000’s with its pairing of Jackie Chan (one of the greatest action heroes of the ’90s) and Chris Tucker, and nearly 20 years after the release of the (frankly forgettable) Rush Hour 3, many continue to wonder when and if Rush Hour 4 will ever get off the ground. Here’s something that might be called a hot take – not only will Rush Hour 4 probably never happen, it also probably should never happen.
The only thing more surprising than someone laying their two cents on Rush Hour 4 is the fact that that assessment is coming from a lifelong and die-hard Jackie Chan fanboy like myself. However, there comes a time when even the most devoted of fans should ask, “Has this franchise finally run its course?” While talks of Rush Hour 4 have popped up over the years as recently as 2022 by Jackie Chan himself (per Deadline), it doesn’t seem like there’s all that much real momentum for Rush Hour 4, and looking back on the Rush Hour trilogy, there’s a good argument to leave it at that.
The Rush Hour Movies Are Fun, But Jackie Chan Has Done Better In His Hollywood Career
The Rush Hour movies broke out as a classic pairing of opposites – “The fastest hands in the East meet the biggest mouth in the West”, as the marketing for 1998’s Rush Hour sold us on, and indeed, Rush Hour delivered in spades on that promise. The cultural differences of Lee and Carter made Rush Hour a hilarious buddy comedy for its time, and it also landed right at the perfect time when Hong Kong action was first starting to breakout in Hollywood. It does seem that there was something in the air circa 1997/1998 when the concept of Asian and black buddy duos teaming up in comedic action romps with Hong Kong-style fight choreography seemed to really be on a lot of filmmakers ‘ minds. 1997’s cult classic Drive got the ball rolling on that with Mark Dacascos and Kadeem Hardison in a sci-fi Hong Kong action comedy (was an early indicator of how much DTV action would come to reign supreme in the 21st century). With Rush Hour and the Sammo Hung-led TV series Martial Law arriving in 1998, the general Rush Hour-style template was really catching on. Meanwhile, Wesley Snipes’ Blade and Jet Li’s Hollywood break-out in Lethal Weapon 4 and 2000’s Romeo Must Die helped make Hong Kong action the standard to follow in the West in the early 21st century.
Looking back, though, the Rush Hour movies honestly aren’t the best showcase of Jackie Chan-style action that he’s delivered in his Western career. Jackie’s 2008 team-up with Jet Li, The Forbidden Kingdom, 2010’s The Karate Kid, and both of the Shanghai movies all have far more complex action sequences and stunts that better match Jackie’s Hong Kong work. Even in Jackie’s more advanced years, 2017’s The Foreigner delivers more visceral action scenes and stunt work. That isn’t to say that the fight scenes and stunts of the Rush Hour movies are lackluster (at least, not in the case of the first two), but by overall Jackie Chan standards, the Rush Hour trilogy is firmly in the “good, not great” category of the kind of action Jackie could pull off in his sleep in his heyday. Funnily enough, the action of the Rush Hour movies is still what they are best enjoyed for (again, excluding the utterly forgettable action of Rush Hour 3), as other aspects of the Rush Hour movies are a bit more complicated.
The Rush Hour Movies Haven’t Aged Well – Like, At All!
The Rush Hour franchise is a product of its time, and so it would be unfair to hold it to how much cultural standards of comedy have evolved. There should be no call to cancel the Rush Hour movies or anyone involved with them (save for their thoroughly disgraced director), especially when so many of us alive today were laughing hellaciously at the jokes of every Rush Hour movie. With all of that said, the Rush Hour movies bank very heavily on some seriously racist and misogynist comedy.
Think about just how many times Carter denigrates Asians in the Rush Hour movies – from telling Carter proclaiming “All ya’ll look alike!” after accidentally punching him during Rush Hour 2’s massage parlor brawl, or demanding “All the Triads and the ugly women on this side, and all the fine women on this side!” in the karaoke bar. Or just how much of the movie’s focus is upon Carter (and at certain points Lee) ogling attractive women like teenagers midway through puberty. Or how many times the Rush Hour movies cross the streams on the two.
Don’t get me wrong, none of the above is an attempt to scold anyone who did or still does get a good laugh from Rush Hour’s style of shock humor that often veers into pushing buttons on racist and misogynistic jokes that were commonplace at the time. And some of it still works in a fish-out-of-water quality with the genuine cultural differences Lee and Carter respective encounter in Los Angeles and Hong Kong. But here’s the real question – when so much of Rush Hour’s brand of humor was based on ruffling feathers in a way that would get the ruffler tarred and feathered today, is it even worth it to make Rush Hour 4 with how much it would have to be neutered from the series’ essence just to avoid the kind of pitchforks and torches wrath any one of the original trilogy would undoubtedly incur today? It’s easy and even fun to watch the Rush Hour movies today, see the series’ particular sense of humor, and acknowledge it all as a time capsule while chuckling uncomfortably and muttering, “That would get destroyed if it came out today!” Trying to de-fang Rush Hour for modern sensibilities of comedy simply to avoid cancel-happy headlines would take all of that out of the equation, and result in Rush Hour 4 not feeling like Rush Hour at all. In that respect, the Rush Hour trilogy really is best enjoyed as a relic of the ‘90s and early 2000s, full of shock humor that would never fly today but which can be understood for the time it originated from.
The Shanghai Movies Do The Rush Hour Gimmick Better
Aside from all of the above, there’s also another comparison point that makes the idea of Rush Hour 4 seem not all that appealing, that being Shanghai Noon and Shanghai Knights. Released in 2000 and 2003, the Shanghai movies essentially took the Rush Hour gimmick of pairing Jackie Chan with a fast-talking American sidekick and transplanted it into the Old West. And honestly, the Shanghai movies do the job a lot better. Part of that is rooted in the fact that the Shanghai movies don’t even come close to taking themselves seriously, with Shanghai Knights in particular being full of casual and mostly intentional historical inaccuracies that are just thrown into the mix for the sake of having a lot of historical fun.
There’s also the comparison of Owen Wilson’s Roy O’Bannon having a charm that Carter just never shows. Sure, he’s a bumbling schemer, but you get the impression that Chon Wang’s friendship is on a much more stable foundation than Lee and Carter’s ever was, Roy’s genuine admiration of Chon’s martial arts skills being a marked contrast to Carter’s “DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH?” greeting.
On that note, that Jackie Chan action of the Shanghai movies is also far better than that of the Rush Hour movies. If Rush Hour’s action is like the food sample on a toothpick, the Shanghai movies give you the full seven-course Jackie Chan Hong Kong-style dinner with the kind of fights and stunts Jackie was doing in Rumble in the Bronx and Mr. Nice Guy at the time. Even better, the Shanghai movies bring in some real martial arts movie greats as villains opposite Jackie, including Roger Yuan in Shanghai Noon and a pre-breakout Donnie Yen in Shanghai Knights. Compared to how much Rush Hour 3 completely wastes Hiroyuki Sanada, putting the two franchises side-by-side, it’s just clear that the Shanghai movies have a far stronger grasp on Jackie Chan’s brand of Hong Kong action.
In all, the nearly two-decade-long quest to make Rush Hour 4 happen has still not and might never yield results, and it’s probably for the best. The Rush Hour movies delivered on everything they had to offer with their buddy comedy gimmick and boundary-pushing humor for their time, but Rush Hour 4 simply couldn’t be made the same way today without sparking a moral panic. Moreover, the Rush Hour movies are fun and action-packed, but aren’t representative of the best action Jackie Chan’s done in his Hollywood career. Rush Hour 4 will probably never be, but Jackie’s moving on to a new phase anyway with Karate Kid: Legends, so let’s enjoy that ride.
