Jackie Chan Thought ‘Rush Hour’ Was "Terrible"
Despite the fact that it’s the year 2025, everyone is talking about the Rush Hour franchise.
Why? Well because Donald Trump has reportedly pressured Paramount into greenlighting a fourth entry of the Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker-starring buddy cop series (possibly in order to help out a filmmaker who’s too toxic to get jobs without presidential intervention).
But while the current president may be a big fan, not everyone feels the same way. And surprisingly, one of Rush Hour’s biggest critics was Jackie Chan himself.
Don't Miss
Per CBC, back in 2007, Chan published a blog entry on his website trashing Brett Ratner’s trilogy. And this was in late September, just over a month after the release of Rush Hour 3. While discussing the original 1998 film, Chan noted that he merely wanted to “test the U.S. market” and wasn’t impressed by the results.
"When we finished filming, I felt very disappointed because it was a movie I didn't appreciate and I did not like the action scenes involved,” Chan wrote. “I felt the style of action was too Americanized and I didn't understand the American humour." In 2017, Chan explained to Yahoo that he thought Rush Hour was a “terrible” movie and was frustrated that the filmmakers didn’t let him do his “own style” of action.
According to his blog post, Chan agreed to make Rush Hour 2, but that was only because he was offered an “irresistable” sum of money to participate.
As for Rush Hour 3, Chan said that "nothing particularly exciting stood out that made this movie special for me,” adding that “I spent four months making this film and I still don't fully understand the humour.”
When discussing the threequel more recently he remarked, “too much money, too much time. Too much money is no good.”
This past June, Chan told People that he was particularly baffled by the original film’s jokes, including its most memorable line. “The people laughing (at) ‘Never touch a Black man’s radio’ – I just… Why? Why so funny? I just don’t understand. A totally different culture,” he explained. Chan did admit that after making Rush Hour and the Shanghai Noon movies, he began to understand American culture “a little bit, but still not a lot.”
Regardless of his opinions of the series’ quality, Chan has repeatedly expressed an interest in making Rush Hour 4, which is seemingly about to be willed into existence by Trump.
This also means there’s a non-zero chance that the White House will soon announce an executive order greenlighting Collision Course 2 starring Jay Leno and a CGI Pat Morita.
