The movie Chris Tucker regrets making: “Y’all done messed this whole thing up”
The Rush Hour franchise has been in the news rather frequently as of late, but not always for the reasons its stars may have wanted.
1998 was a great year for cinema that saw the release of such classics as Saving Private Ryan, The Truman Show, American History X, Gods and Monsters, and The Thin Red Line, but ironically enough, no other film released in that 12-month period has been as influential as Rush Hour. Although it was a fairly generic buddy comedy with a fair amount of crass and offensive humour, it somehow became a sensation that spawned a franchise.
The series has now been dormant for well over a decade, but Rush Hour was last brought into the news due to a request from the United States President Donald Trump, who has put pressure on new leadership at Paramount to greenlight a fourth film in the series that would bring back Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. Why Trump is so interested in a second-rate action-comedy franchise is unclear, but it may have to do with the film’s director, Brett Ratner, as they were both friends of the convicted sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein.
Ratner may have the reputation of being the biggest hack in Hollywood; between X-Men: The Last Stand, After the Sunset, Hercules, Money Talks, and Tower Heist, he has been involved in some of the worst films of the past several decades. However, his willingness to direct the Trump administration’s propaganda film Melania may have cosied him up to Trump, giving him more motivation to insist upon a fourth film in the Rush Hour series.
Although the fourth instalment would certainly be framed as a way for the director to make his comeback, Paramount may have to work harder in order to convince the original stars to return. Tucker revealed that he had a negative experience making Rush Hour 3, and that he “thought it could have been better”.
“First of all, they wouldn’t really let me do my thing, you know, because the first one I did my thing, and, you know, I knew what to do,” Tucker said, “When you start making a lot of money, everybody wanna do what they wanna do, and they give me the script like, ‘Here, here’s how you be funny’. I’m like, ‘Ah man, y’all done messed this whole thing up’.”
While none of the Rush Hour films have been particularly well-received, the third film stands out as feeling specifically lazy and adherent to formula, as even Tucker and Chan appear to be going through the motions.
That the third film made significantly less and earned worse reviews when compared to Rush Hour 2 seemed to indicate that the franchise was headed for an early grave, but no one could have predicted that the American president would take a personal interest in the next set of adventures of Chief Inspector Lee and Detective James Carter.
The franchise has also attracted enough controversies regarding some of the racist, sexist, and homophobic humour, but it hasn’t seemed to affect its popularity among audiences as long as Tucker and Chan are involved. Tucker’s involvement in Rush Hour 4 would be critical to its success, which leads to a very unusual opportunity; of all the predictions about 2026, few would have anticipated that Tucker would have leverage over the president of the United States.
