‘Rush Hour 3’ or — The Film That Attempts To Rehabilitate Polanski?!!!
I was watching ‘Rush Hour 3’ (2007) last night (hey, it’s not avant-garde movie night EVERY night at chez Edwards!) when the film got to a moment when Chris Tucker’s character takes some time out from behaving like a sociopath to sexually harass two young women, both of whom are bent over their car allowing the camera (and us) to gaze at their backsides with such leering intensity I started to wonder if cameras could drool. The movie goes even more morally downhill from here.
“Ugh!” I jokingly thought to myself, “This film is starting to feel like it was directed by a sex offender.” And then I remembered it was a Brett Ratner movie. Whoa! Let’s slow down. That’s all speculation so far and why judge a movie based on gossip? And if you are an actual sex offender would you be so stupid as to flag it up in your work? Let’s just watch the rest of the film and…
… and then Roman Polanski turns up and sexually assaults Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. I am not kidding. The two arrive in France (for some unfathomable plot reason) and the very first thing that happens on touching French soil is being met, and molested, by Polanski. The actual Roman Polanski. What. The. Fuck?!
Not only that but Polanksi and his sexual idiosyncracies pop up as the film’s closing gag, apparently now that moral icon Bret Ratner has gone over to France and addressed the issue surrounding the disgraced film directors past everything can be forgiven and everyone can move on. Hooray! Aren’t film directors just wonderful people who look after and support each other.
So here we have a nasty, shallow movie that has an attitude towards sex and women that is sub-infantile, made by an alleged sex offender and starring a pedophile. I was hoping Jackie Chan would at least bring some moral center to the film but he just looks lost here. This is one fight he is not going to win.
Yet the real issue for me with ‘Rush Hour 3’ isn’t just the contemporary ugliness surrounding Ratner etc or any of the other current revelations that feel so unwittingly (or maybe not? Is this film a cry for help?) manifested on the screen here. It reminded me that cinema was built by men seeking power through that flicking light, and nearly always sexual power. It’s not just Weinstein and Ratner but all the way back to Mayer, Griffith, Selznick etc who made Hollywood not just through determination but also the abuse of countless actresses, secretaries, typists or anything female that breathed or moved that they could unleash their frustrated egos onto. Robert Towne chose the wrong liquid in ‘Chinatown’ (1974) for causing the creation of L.A.: it wasn’t water that produced Hollywood but semen. ‘Rush Hour 3’ made me hate cinema.
So that’s where my mind went to whilst watching ‘Rush Hour 3’. It’s not just that this is a horrible, ugly film but that ugly and horrible men are putting their behaviour and “values” up on screen and, with spectacularly presumptuous arrogance, asking us not only to accept it all but to absolve and even celebrate it along with them!
Oh, and not only that, but the film is fucking shit too. Christ.
