Why ‘Rush Hour 2’ Is My Favorite Childhood Movie
By: Ryan Fan
Tags: Equality, Self, Film, Race, Culture

It’s no secret that there isn’t that much Asian-American representation in film — a culture war hot topic that’s been addressed recently. Growing up as a first-generation Asian-American, I certainly did not see all too much Asian representation in film, but there was one actor I consistently saw:

Jackie Chan.

I saw Jackie Chan in a lot of movies my family liked in the early to mid 2000s, which were of the action-comedy variety. These included Rumble in the Bronx, Police Story, and Mr. Nice Guy. Jackie Chan was and still is known for being a master actor and stuntman in every movie — his ability to make seemingly impossible kicks and jumps look easy made him a legend to many Americans.

To me, however, it was different — Jackie Chan was just the only Asian I saw in American movies, and that trend has stayed constant. When I first started teaching in Baltimore City, I remember covering a 12th grade math class where the students didn’t know my name, so they called me Jackie Chan. The second thing I’m usually called is Bruce Lee, but for a long time Jackie Chan was the symbol and emblem of Asians in America.

All of my students are Black, and Rush Hour 2 is a movie where Chris Tucker, a Black man, and Jackie Chan, an Asian man, work together, laugh together, and act together. It’s a movie that might have been ahead of its time given the anti-Black prejudice I’ve personally experienced within the Asian community. All of my students are Black and my girlfriend is Black, and we all have a lot of difficult conversations and experiences together, and I always found Rush Hour 2 as an engine to dive into those difficult conversations, with a lot of laughter.

My favorite Jackie Chan movie, where he became more than just an actor but someone I saw myself in, was Rush Hour 2. (It wasn’t Rush Hour because I simply saw Rush Hour 2 first.)

The plot of Rush Hour 2 goes as follows: following the events of the first movie, where LAPD Detective James Carter (played by Chris Tucker) and Hong Kong Chief Inspector Lee (played by Jackie Chan) are on vacation. During their vacation, a bomb goes off at the United States Consulate General, which kills two undercover U.S. customs agents.

Lee is assigned to be the investigator of the case after his boss tells him that the one person involved in the bombing was Ricky Tan, his father’s former police partner, who is suspected of killing Lee’s father. They discover that Rick Tan leads the Triads, and then Lee and Carter go on a journey in both Hong Kong and Los Angeles to bring justice to Ricky Tan and his Triad associates.

I have seen Rush Hour 2 at least seven times — I couldn’t get enough as a kid for one simple reason: it was really funny. I probably first saw it when I was six. Movie reviews, by and large, however, didn’t like the movie. Rush Hour 2 has a 52% positive rating from critics on Rotten Tomatoes. Fortunately, audience members liked the movie more than the critics did with a 74% rating.

I watched Rush Hour 2 with everyone. I saw it with my mom, my dad, my brother, and all of my friends. They would start to get annoyed by me wanting to watch the movie so much. But I insisted, of course, and we kept watching. It became much more than a movie every time, but an event and experience that the theaters couldn’t parallel.

I have not seen the movie in years. But it holds an indelible mark in my heart not only because of the experience and the bonding conversations I had with others, but because seeing Jackie Chan succeed in a very commercially successful movie, in retrospect, was a major breakthrough for how I saw myself.

Yes, I did try all the kicks and moves that Jackie Chan did in the movie, like every other Jackie Chan movie. No, I wasn’t successful. To this day, I can barely touch my toes when I reach down, and doing kicks and stunts like Jackie Chan requires a fair amount of flexibility.

But I will always remember the joy in seeing an Asian-American actor in Jackie Chan become commercially successful in America. Sure, I’d seen Asians in film before — but those were often Chinese movies and soap operas I often watched with my parents. Rush Hour 2 made $347.3 million, which certainly showed that the movie had rich, international appeal.

“Jackie orchestrates yet another masterful display of chop socky mayhem that sees him disposing of bad guys with everything from a Persian rug to a wastepaper bin,” Neil Smith said at BBC.

End Credits Blooper Reel for Rush Hour 2

I don’t quite remember a movie whose bloopers I kept replaying on YouTube over and over again. I loved Chris Tucker in the movie as much as I loved Jackie Chan, and the chemistry between the two made the dialogue particularly funny.

Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker navigate a landscape of Black-Asian relations and do it as masterfully as they could have in 2001. They clearly get along in their lines as well as in the bloopers, and I personally recently talked to a reporter about the Asian-American experience in America. I told the reporter that my experience is different from most other Asian-Americans in America — in the classroom and in much of my personal life, I navigate Black spaces while many Asian-Americans, in my personal experience, tend to navigate more White spaces. Frankly, I found my situation a bit unusual for Asian-Americans and the reporter did as well.

The movie rings true to me today, and in 2020, I doubt a movie like Rush Hour 2 would have been made — so I can’t talk about the movie without getting into its critiques of racial stereotypes and jokes. In one particularly tense scene, when both protagonists are tied up in the back of a truck, Carter says that he’ll slap Lee, and Lee retorts by telling Carter that “I’ll bitch slap you back to Africa.”

Since the movie was made in 2001 and it’s now 2020, it’s clear that that line hasn’t aged very well — at all. Other lines in the movie haven’t either.

However, in a 2006 journal article published in the Journal of Communication, Ji Hoon Park, Nadine Gabbadon and Ariel Chernin explored the ideological implications of racial stereotypes in comedy through an analysis of Rush Hour 2. They had Asian, Black, and White participants engage with racial stereotypes in the movie, and Asian and Black participants, in particular, found the racial jokes a source of pleasure and found that “the negative portrayals of their own race…did not produce oppositional discourse.”

Basically, the authors of the study conclude that the comedy of Rush Hour 2 “naturalize[s] racial differences.” Another study from Matt Lee at Elon University said that the movie perpetuated the most racial stereotypes of Asians than any other ethnicity. But Lee also notes that Rush Hour 2 was groundbreaking in that it had two minorities as its leads and an Asian and Black man as its heroes, which just didn’t happen at a time.

Yes, Rush Hour 2 was flawed, but I can’t name a single other movie, even in 2020, that included a Black man and Asian man as its dual leads. Where other movies failed to go, the Rush Hour franchise did in a way that, to this day, is the only film I’ve watched featuring the biracial dynamics between Asian and Black Americans, much like my relationship or my connections with my students.

“A movie like Rush Hour, released in 1998, rather than showing the “progressiveness” of Hollywood, demonstrated instead its reliance on traditional stereotypical tropes when portraying people of color,” wrote Bea Conti at Emory University. “However, with a Chinese lead man and a Black American lead man, the movie broke decades-long rules on who could be leads in Hollywood.”

Contrary to popular belief, I don’t really find it that offensive when I’m called “Jackie Chan” by my students. In fact, I’m glad to be compared to Jackie Chan and I understand that a large part of the comparison is just a lack of exposure to Asians in film, culture, and daily life.

Rush Hour 2 may have been made over 20 years ago, but I still love the movie. It went where no other movie did and holds a personal connection, close to home. And it made me laugh — a lot.