When I was a fight-directing apprentice with the Hong Kong action crew on Sammo Hung's MARTIAL LAW, Jackie dropped by the set to pay his respects to Sammo. On the one hand, it's the franchise that financially and box-office-wise keeps Hollywood's door open for Jackie, keeping alive the hope that one day he might make a Hollywood film that matters to him. RUSH HOUR has indeed been a peculiar traffic jam in Jackie's life. But this is old news for the RUSH HOUR franchise ? in fact, it's one of their aces in the hole, and Tucker and Chan sell it with enough innocence that the raw blatancy of off-kilter humor is more funny than derogatory. But this is 2007, and while the film does indeed make fun of the Chinese, it also takes major comedic license with blacks, whites, Americans, French and just about any other racial epithet the filmmakers can get away with under the hat of slapstick buffoonery. If I was a staunch old-school Chinese Communist pavement-beater from the 1950s-1970s, I could see how they would think that an American film like RUSH HOUR 3 is an attempt to undermine the Chinese people. But many insiders have heard through the grapevine that the film makes the Chinese people look bad. The unofficial word is that coverage of the Triads in the film is too controversial a subject for the Chinese (like gangster characters have never existed in Chinese films before). That's like saying Joe Namath is as inconsequential to the New York Jets or Michael Jordan to the Chicago Bulls as Tiddlywinks is to the Olympic Games. Rumor has it that the Chinese state-run Film Bureau, limited to allowing only 20 foreign films to be imported into the country each year, had already filled its quota so it had its hands tied in refusing their national golden boy's film RUSH HOUR 3.

RUSH HOUR 3 is by far the funniest film this whole summer, and what makes it even funnier is that it has been banned in China.

Rush hour 3 watch online