Rush Hour 3 - Review

The Eiffel Tower does not have a bad angle. In 1998's Rush Hour, Jackie Chan was the Hong Kong cop thrust out of his comfort zone in L.A., but finding a buddy in local fuzz Chris Tucker. Three years later, it was Tucker's turn to be the stranger in a strange land when he re-teamed with Chan for Rush Hour 2. Rush Hour 3 begins in L.A., but quickly moves to Paris, making both men fish out of water for their first outing in six years. That does not make this lame buddy comedy twice as funny, as most of the humor is dead on arrival, but at least the action climaxes on the famed Parisian landmark. It will take your breath away in a good way, even if paying $10 or so for a movie ticket to see this mediocrity leaves you feeling sucker punched.

There are a few bright spots. Chan's acrobatics are as fun to watch as ever, if not quite as daring as they were in his youth. Tucker lands the occasional joke, in particular in one scene where he riffs off the old Abbott and Costello routine "Who's on First?" with instructors at a karate academy. But the franchise is definitely showing its age and this seems more like an attempt to cash in on the first two movies' popularity than an honest attempt (however failed) to reinvigorate it.

Lee (Chan) and Carter (Tucker) reunite to chase after the elusive Shy Shen, a notorious figure associated with the Asian criminal gang, the Triads. Their only clues are an address and a name, "Genevieve," and there are any number of Triad associates determined to stop them, including Kenji (Hiroyuki Sanada), Lee's foster brother turned assassin. It is a dangerous situation and only grows more so, once they meet Genevieve (Noemie Lenoir), and discover that she has been targeted for death.

Like Rush Hour 2, the new sequel was written by Jeff Nathanson, who displays none of the skill that earned him a BAFTA nomination for his work on Catch Me if You Can. Instead, he seems to be reverting back to the bad old days of Speed 2: Cruise Control, the legendary bomb that earned him a Razzie nod. How much he is to blame for this nonsense is debatable, since director Brett Ratner appears to embrace every improvisation, no matter how weak, and does not seem to subscribe to the theory that his movies need to make sense just so long as he keeps things moving.

None of that would matter, of course, if the jokes were funnier and the action less thoroughly predictable. The scenes on the Eiffel Tower have a certain panache, but the rest is just action movie cliché. Legendary auteur Roman Polanski pathetically appears in a throwaway cameo as a French cop, while My Wife is an Actress director Yvan Attal no doubt earned a chunk of his next film's budget in the idiotic role of an anti-American French cabbie who learns to embrace all-American violence thanks to new pals Carter and Lee. Rush Hour 3 is just sad, but what is sadder still is the certainty that there will be a Rush Hour 4.

Sunshine - Review

Stunning set pieces do not a movie make. Case in point: Danny Boyle's Sunshine, a heady, often spellbinding science fiction thriller that jettisons dramatic credibility in its sketchily conceived and executed third act. Overly solemn and weighted down with portentousness, Boyle's disappointing follow-up to the ebullient charmer Millions (2005) has neither the jazzy energy nor the full-throttle narrative drive that distinguishes his best films, like Trainspotting (1996) and 28 Days Later (2003). That Boyle and his co-screenwriter Alex Garland ultimately take such an ill-advised narrative detour into contrivance is mystifying, for Sunshine clearly had the potential to be a classic of the science fiction film genre, as gripping as it is provocative.

The basic concept of Sunshine glimmers with promise. Fifty years from now, our sun is dying. Unless the eight-member crew of the aptly named Icarus II can reignite the sun by detonating a massive, nuclear device in its interior, all life on Earth will perish. Led by the stalwart Captain Kaneda (Hiroyuki Sanada), the Icarus II crew members embark on what may be a suicide mission; seven years earlier, the Icarus I vanished before reaching its target. Although Capa (Cillian Murphy), the Icarus II physicist, attempts to safeguard against disaster by calculating the ever-shifting risk-assessment of the mission, neither he nor anyone else could have anticipated that they'd pick up a faint distress signal from the Icarus I.

Overriding the objections of Mace (Chris Evans), the crew's volatile engineer, Kaneda orders Cassie (Rose Byrne), the mission pilot, to rendezvous with the long-lost ship in search of survivors. Almost immediately, however, calamity strikes the Icarus II, due to an oversight by Trey (Benedict Wong), the sleep-deprived navigator. Despite this near-fatal setback, the crippled Icarus II continues on course for its predecessor, where the increasingly embattled crew encounters an unexpected threat-not just to the mission, but their very survival.

In a recent New York Times article, Boyle and Garland expressed their desire to make Sunshine "a head trip," closer in tone to metaphysical-themed science fiction films like 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) and Solaris (1972) than escapist, special effects extravaganzas in the Star Wars (1977) mold. To a degree, Boyle and Garland succeed, for there's a crypto-religious undercurrent to Sunshine that becomes more pronounced in the film's second half, when a character's religious-fueled mania provides the dramatic catalyst for the film's descent into bloody violence. It's a potent conceit that might have worked if the filmmakers hadn't introduced it so clumsily into their narrative, which effectively degenerates into an outer space version of a "slasher" flick, albeit one that flirts with profundity.

Sunshine is also an atypically humorless entry from Boyle, who's never made a film this oddly devoid of personality. The crew of the Icarus II—Cliff Curtis, Troy Garity, and Michelle Yeoh round out the underutilized cast—are little more than ciphers, adding to the body count. As a result, you don't form much of an emotional attachment to any of them, even as some of them meet their demise in spectacular, nerve-fraying scenes that confirms Boyle's flair for viscerally-charged imagery that's both disturbing and mesmerizing. Indeed, there are so many arresting scenes in Sunshine that it's all the more disappointing that Boyle's latest film sadly turns out to be less than the sum of its dazzling parts.