Rush Hour

Brett Ratner’s film puts a Hong Kong policeman who hardly speaks and a Los Angeles policeman who hardly stops in the same car and asks them to find a kidnapped child. Ross LaManna and Jim Kouf’s script would fit on a napkin, and Rush Hour knows it, and spends its 97 minutes getting out of the way of two men who are funnier together than either has any right to be. That is enough for an evening, and not much more.

Jackie Chan plays Lee as a polite, tidy man who is embarrassed by violence and extremely good at it. The opening raid on a Hong Kong dock is over before we have worked out who anyone is, but once Lee reaches Los Angeles the action settles into Chan’s own rhythm: a brawl in a pool hall he did not start, and a scrap in a Chinatown restaurant where he does more with a chair and a stool than most films manage with a stunt team. Adam Greenberg shoots most of it wide enough that we can see it is Chan doing the work, and Mark Helfrich holds the takes longer than an American action film of 1998 usually would.

Chris Tucker plays Carter at a pitch only dogs should hear. He talks to everyone, and most of all to Lee, who he has been told does not speak English and who lets him believe it for a long time. “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?” is the line everyone remembers, but the moment that won us over is smaller: Carter alone in his Corvette, singing along to Edwin Starr’s “War”, and then later the same song with Lee joining in, flat and delighted. We laughed, properly and more than once, and almost all of it was the two faces together, Tucker’s mouth going and Chan’s eyebrows answering.

Chan, it turns out, is a fine straight man. He listens. When Carter abandons him on a tour bus and he ends up on the Hollywood sign, the joke is not the stunt but the patient expression he wears while doing it. Neither actor is trying to win the scene from the other, and the film has the sense to keep them in the same frame.

Everyone else is scenery. Tom Wilkinson, as Griffin, and Tzi Ma, as the anxious father Consul Han, are given rooms to stand in and lines to deliver gravely. Mark Rolston and Rex Linn’s agents exist to be wrong. Philip Baker Hall does his weary-captain voice in two scenes. Elizabeth Peña, as Johnson, is mostly there to be flirted at. Ken Leung’s Sang is a good sneer in a bad haircut.

Lalo Schifrin’s score is the film’s best supporting player: brass, bongos and wah-wah guitar from the man who scored Dirty Harry (1971), so that Carter walks into every room as if that year had never ended. Robb Wilson King gives Los Angeles a Chinatown of red lanterns and back kitchens and a consulate that looks like a bank. Sharen Davis puts Lee in one grey suit and Carter in shirts you can hear. Greenberg lights the city bright and flat, as a comedy should be lit.

Somewhere past the hour the film remembers it has a plot, and for a quarter of an hour the leads are separated while agents explain things to each other. We felt the drop. We were waiting, a little impatiently, for the next car journey, and so, plainly, was the film. Some of the comedy has not aged kindly either: the pool-hall scene turns on a word the film uses first for a laugh and then for a fight.

Against 48 Hrs. (1982) and Lethal Weapon (1987), this is the gentler version, a 12 rather than a bloodbath, with the mismatched-partners machinery running on charm rather than threat. Ratner points the camera at two funny men and keeps still, which was the right decision. Watch it at home with someone who laughs easily. It runs 97 minutes, which is exactly how long the joke lasts.