Movie review: 'Rush Hour 3'

If "The Bourne Ultimatum" is the best of the summer threes, "Rush Hour 3" is easily the worst. Director Brett Ratner, who built a career on this buddy cop franchise, has cobbled together a lazy and formulaic action comedy that is neither thrilling nor particularly funny.

Ratner also has the chutzpah to use the film as an anti-war statement. Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker travel to France, where a tres Parisian taxi driver taunts them about America's failures in Vietnam and Iraq; later, after a few adventures with these guys, the cabbie will exuberantly embrace American culture, saying he wants to know what it feels like to kill someone for no reason. The whole thing wraps up with Chan and Tucker dancing in the street to Edwin Starr's "War."

But "Rush Hour 3" doesn't work as social commentary either. Six years after "Rush Hour 2," which grossed $329 million worldwide, it just feels as if everyone involved has been dragged back to cash in one more time.

The script from Jeff Nathanson ("Rush Hour 2") finds Chan's Inspector Lee and Tucker's LAPD Detective Carter reteaming after the assassination of the Chinese ambassador to determine who's behind an international crime ring. Max von Sydow co-stars; if Ingmar Bergman hadn't just died, this would have killed him.

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