Rush Hour
Short description
Rush Hour follows a Hong Kong police inspector, Lee, who travels to Los Angeles after the young daughter of a Chinese consul is kidnapped. The FBI, keen to keep foreign involvement to a minimum, asks the LAPD to keep Lee occupied, and the task falls to James Carter, a loud, impulsive detective. The two men initially get in each other's way, but they soon work the case together rather than watch from the sidelines, pursuing the criminals behind the abduction. The film sets their contrasting temperaments against a backdrop of police procedure and martial-arts action.
Brett Ratner directed, working from a screenplay by Jim Kouf and Ross LaManna. It was the second of the thirteen films he has directed, arriving between Money Talks and The Family Man. Jackie Chan plays Lee and Chris Tucker plays Carter, with Tom Wilkinson, Philip Baker Hall, Elizabeth Peña and Chris Penn in supporting roles. Roughly sixty performers and a hundred and fifty crew members are credited.
Produced by New Line Cinema with Roger Birnbaum Productions, Caravan Pictures and Arthur Sarkissian Productions, the film cost about thirty-three million dollars and took around two hundred and forty-five million worldwide, a strong return. It has a 7.1 rating on IMDb from some 326,000 votes and the same 7.1 on TMDB from far fewer votes. Critics' score is 6.5 from seventy-three reviews, so audiences rate it only slightly above the critical average.
What's left behind the scenes
- Chris Tucker was not the first choice for the role; Martin Lawrence was initially considered.
- Dave Chappelle auditioned for the role of James Carter.
- Jackie Chan nearly died during the filming of a scene where metal crates fell on him. They collapsed in the place where the actor's head had been just fractions of a second after he moved it.
- The release of this film served as inspiration for the creation of “Rotten Tomatoes,” a website-aggregator that collects film and television reviews from various publications, film information, and cinema news. Its founder, Duong Seng, is a big fan of the actor and decided to create a site to collect all reviews of Chan's Hong Kong films as they were released in the US. The site was ready shortly before the film's release, taking two weeks to create. It is now one of the most authoritative sources of information about films, with its own film rating system.
- As he almost always does in the films he appears in, Chris Tucker improvised almost all of his lines. According to director Brett Ratner, in one scene with Tucker and a snitch played by John Hawkes, there was so much improvisation that it was only with great difficulty that they were able to piece it together in editing to create a coherent conversation.
- According to Jackie Chan, the scene where his character first meets the character played by Chris Tucker is very reminiscent of the first meeting and acquaintance of the actors themselves at the Hollywood talent agency "William Morris". Tucker talked so much that after the meeting, Chan told his manager: "I didn't understand a single thing he said." This phrase was later included in the film.
- After filming and editing were completed, a preview screening of the film was organized for audiences, and they demanded more action scenes with Jackie Chan. They had to reshoot the scene where Chan's character fights a multitude of opponents in the finale, and the scene with the large vase.
- Towards the end, when Soo Yung reunites with her father, a news van is parked near the museum in the background. The inscription on the van begins with the letter W, which is typical for television and radio stations in the eastern United States, with some exceptions. In the western United States, names usually begin with K, of course. A name cannot begin with W in Los Angeles.
- In Chinatown, Carter shows Inspector Lee a John Wayne rock. In the film “Shanghai Noon” (2000), Jackie Chan plays Chong Wang, a role previously played by John Wayne.
Similar movies
Auditions in India
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Кастинги в Україні
