Rush Hour 3

Rush Hour was an original, amusing riff on the conventions of buddy-cop and kung-fu films. Rush Hour 2 was the same, but a bit less fresh and a bit more annoying.

Rush Hour 3 is the same again, except now Chris Tucker spends most of the time begging for a punch in the head.

You already know the story. Someone’s being threatened, and Detectives Lee (Jackie Chan) and Carter (Chris Tucker) go overseas to investigate (Paris this time), end up having slapstick fights, romance, and the occasional shallow emotion, but it all comes right in the end.

Six years since the last instalment, there’s a general feeling of staleness. Where the first and second film could have functioned as one film, this one feels awkwardly tacked on. Yes, Chan and Tucker do their usual shtick, but it’s too predictable to be compelling. The jokes are too loud and obvious, the romance is perfunctory, and the emotional scenes are cliché. And a climactic fight at the Eiffel Tower? Not obvious at all.

It only works when it doesn’t try too hard. Not really one for subtlety is our Brett Ratner (Rush Hour 1 & 2, X-Men 3), but he has at least managed to be occasionally satirical. The buddy cop genre gets a probing whack, with plenty of gay jokes, though even those become a bit jarring. A decent subplot involving a French cab driver makes for intermittent amusement and a deceptively lighthearted critique of American violence. There are some nice references to other films, particularly the scene parodying Bruce Lee’s Game Of Death, but all in all it’s too heavy-handed to really succeed.

Everything else about the film goes without saying. There’s a lot of banter and some quite good action scenes. Jackie Chan, as always, is fun to watch even if his partner is rapidly losing spark. There are some nice special effects, though at times the cracks in the CGI are gratingly visible, and Paris looks too cardboard cutout to be convincing.

It’s a shame, really, that something initially so intelligent should begin to be nibbled around the edges by the same sort of demons that kept the Police Academy series going.

Somebody, please, stop it before it hurts itself.

Hairspray

I’ve got a new favourite movie. Not necessarily the favourite, but one of those films you become instantly obsessed with and intend to see every week until you can pre-order the first release of the DVD from the US. The kind of film you actually buy the soundtrack to, instead of downloading it. Hell, I bought the original film two hours after seeing this spiffy new remake.

The film is Hairspray.

Based on the Broadway musical, which was based on John Waters 1988 non-musical film starring Ricki Lake, Adam Shankman’s re-imagining is becoming most famous for John Travolta’s cross-dressing fatsuit. But while Travolta is surprisingly radiant in the role originally immortalised by transvestite Divine (redeeming him somewhat for the appalling Wild Hogs), the rest of the cast and crew are by no less worthy of praise.

Vibrant, provocative, and occasionally vulgar, Hairspray takes place in 1960s Baltimore, where plump teen Tracy Turnblad (Nikki Blonksy) dreams of stardom on the Bandstand-esque Corny Collins Show, where nice white kids dance and sing every afternoon. Her dreams come true, as is usually the case in this sort of film… but rival Amber von Tussle (Brittany Snow) and her showbiz mother Velma (Michelle Pfeiffer) scheme to remove her and exclude black children from the show permanently.

It all seems strangely topical, even with the bright backdrops, quaint dialogue and, yes, elaborately sprayed hairdos. Negro Day – the day once a month when black children are allowed to perform on the show – would seem ridiculously over-the-top if it didn’t ring so true. But with Shankman’s film there is a lighter spin that the scathing satire of Waters original – particularly confronting scenes are left out, and replaced with more civil and peaceful protestations – it’s almost necessary due to the musical genre. But overwhelmingly it retains the intentions of the original, if a little more upbeat. More emphasis is placed on Tracy’s family and in setting up the story, and the film is of a much better quality, neatening the clumsy script and making the kitsch lovable instead of laughable.

The cast are generally flawless. Highschool Musical’s Zac Efron’s turn as love interest Link Larkin proves that he can be credible instead of a sappy Disney warbler, though he still has a long way to go before meeting the calibre of his co-stars. Newcomer Nikki Blonsky shines as Tracy. Christopher Walken and Travolta as her parents are oddly touching, and pluck real emotion from their somewhat carnivalesque roles. The other kids almost upstage their onscreen parents. Elijah Kelley’s black dancer Seaweed complements activist and Negro Day presenter Queen Latifah perfectly, and Brittany Snow is as interesting as deliciously evil Michelle Pfeiffer. Amanda Bynes is genuinely lovable as pigtailed Penny, managing not to be irritating for once in her life, the perfect opposite to hysterically Christian mother Prudy (Alison Janney). The cast are all so wonderful, in fact, that Corny Collins himself (James Marsden) goes almost unnoticed, though he is a standout when he gets a chance.

The songs are delightful: upbeat and comical at times, emotional at others, and every song deserves its spot (though Pfeiffer’s solo could have been cut). It’s toe-tapping, head-bopping fun that, though a remake, is one of the few heartfelt and worthwhile mainstream films of the year.