Rush Hour 2

Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan run it back with two iconic buddy cop characters

A note: Originally, my plan was to place the second half of this essay behind a paywall. However, there’s a joke in that section about Eva Longoria and Eva Mendes that made me so happy when I wrote it that I was like, “You know what? Never mind. No paywall. I’m making this essay free for everybody so that everyone can see this joke.”

And the crazy thing is: It’s really not even that good of a joke. It’s certainly not worth this extra fanfare. But I love it dearly. So here we are.

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Directed By: Brett Ratner
Other Notable Films From Brett Ratner: Money Talks, Red Dragon, After the Sunset
Starring: Chris Tucker, Jackie Chan, Zhang Ziyi, Roselyn Sanchez, John Lone
Screenplay By: Jeff Nathanson
Movie Synopsis: A Hong Kong cop and an LAPD detective zigzag across two continents as they try to stop a gangster who’s printing up nearly untraceable counterfeit money. 
Signature Line: [after a man falls to his death from a penthouse skyrise] “Damn! …He ain’t gonna be in Rush Hour 3.”¹

THE INTRODUCTION
An accounting of time, and people, and context

In 2013, during a celebration of Jackie Chan’s career, an interviewer for the Academy Awards asked Chan if there were any co-stars he’d developed a real friendship and connection with across his more-than-a-half-century-long filmography. After a beat, Chan smiled a big smile, adjusted himself in his chair, and then said one name: “Chris Tucker.” 

When the original Rush Hour came out, it was immediately a movie that I cared about. And the reason I cared about it is because it featured several of my favorite things. It had:

1. Two actors I adored (Chris Tucker, because of his performance in 1995’s Friday, and Jackie Chan, because of his seemingly endless string of first-rate action movies);

2. Some songs on the soundtrack that I greatly liked (specifically, Jay-Z’s “Can I Get A…” and Dru Hill’s “How Deep Is Your Love,” both of which were in heavy rotation on MTV, a thing that was very important back then); and

3. Roots in a subgenre of movies I have always been fascinated with (the interracial buddy cop duo).

That appeal, it turns out, extended to the world at large. 

Upon its release, the movie was an instant hit. It debuted at number one at the box office, garnered surprisingly positive reviews from some of the industry’s most astute movie critics,² and cemented Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker as bonafide, all-caps HOLLYWOOD MOVIE STARS.³ Following its run in the theaters, there was no questioning if there was going to be a Rush Hour 2, the only mystery was: Would the sequel be able to replicate the momentum its predecessor had created?

The answer, in short, was: yes. 

When Rush Hour 2 finally arrived three years later, it was bigger (the budget had nearly tripled, the action now taking place across two separate continents), funnier,⁴ and even more commercially successful ($347 million global box office, which, accounting for inflation, is more than Mission: Impossible — The Final Reckoning, Superman, F:1 The Movie, and The Fantastic Four have earned so far this year). The franchise became a staple of the genre, and an indelible part of popular culture.

And its influence has echoed out ever since. 

THE VIEWING
A timestamped rewatch of Rush Hour

1:43: Here’s a crazy thing: Rush Hour 2 starts with a mysterious woman in a blonde wig and sunglasses delivering a package with a bomb in it. This envelope she’s carrying right here… that's the bomb. But the bomb isn’t actually a normal explosive. It’s just a bunch of copies of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive 1996 issue with Denzel Washington on the cover. When the U.S. Embassy employee opened the envelope and saw Denzel…

Bang. Everybody’s died. That’s actually why they don’t allow magazines with Denzel Washington on the cover in China anymore. Too many buildings kept blowing up. 

2:34: Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker are here. The former plays Inspector Lee, a Hong Kong cop who is very good at punching, and the latter plays Detective Carter, an LAPD detective who is very good at talking. Rush Hour 2 does a great job of leaning on its source material without feeling like it’s doing so because it’s run out of ideas. Here, for example, Lee and Carter listen to The Beach Boys, which is the band Lee tried to play the first day he and Carter were riding around together in Rush Hour.  

3:09: Another example of Rush Hour 2 leaning on its source material: Carter, who believes that two women denied his advances because they could hear The Beach Boys playing from Lee’s car, removes the CD from its player and throws it out the window, prompting Lee to yell, “Don’t you ever touch a Chinese man’s CD,” a callback to Carter yelling “Don’t you ever touch a Black man’s radio” in Rush Hour. (Right here was the moment I knew that I was gonna have a real good time, because when Lee said the Chinese man’s CD line, the audience in the theater where I was watching this whooped and cheered and clapped at the screen.) (This was the same theater I mentioned in the Kill Bill essay, by the way. It was a tiny, family-run cineplex that served as one of the few cultural hubs in the small town where I went to college. It was awesome. Basically any movie that came out between 2000 and 2004, Larami and I watched it there.) 

5:38: Carter’s booing a guy who’s (very poorly) singing Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ‘Til You Get Enough.” Michael Jackson and Chris Tucker actually became friends while Tucker was filming Rush Hour 2, which led to Tucker appearing in Jackson’s “You Rock My World” video. 

5:39: P.S. When’s the last time you watched that music video? I rewatched it while I was researching for this. It starts with Michael Jackson and Chris Tucker ogling women who walk by, and let me tell you: There are few things weirder than seeing Michael Jackson trying to catcall someone. It’s like watching Mickey Mouse smoke a cigarette. 

6:05: A small character thing I really love: As Lee is wandering around the club (he’s secretly looking for a guy named Ricky Tan, the leader of the Triad gang and also the person responsible for Lee’s fathers death), he stumbles upon a room full of Triad gang members. He plays it off like he was looking for a restroom, and so the gang members point him toward the restroom (which is at the opposite end of the hallway). Lee anticipates that they’re probably still looking at him, so right as he walks into the restroom, he begins undoing his belt, fully selling his lie.

6:33: There might be people across history who’ve been AS outgoing and charismatic as Chris Tucker, but there's never been anybody who’s been MORE outgoing and charismatic than Chris Tucker.  

6:34: P.S. I think the thing that makes Chris Tucker so appealing as a movie star (and, really, just as a famous person in general) is… okay, you know how when you were in high school there was a guy there who was funnier than everybody else, and quicker than everybody else, and more magnetic than everybody else? He was always talking shit, and always getting into low-level trouble, but it curiously only ever made people like him more, even (and sometimes especially) the teachers. Chris Tucker is like if that guy made it really big. He feels instantly recognizable, which makes you root for him in a way that feels more personal than it should. 

9:35: Zhang Ziyi is here. She plays Hu Li, a Triad assassin, enforcer, and second-in-command to Ricky Tan. This feels like a good time to point out that she put Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and Rush Hour 2 up on the board over the course of just about eight months, which is nuts. 

10:14: Lee and Carter are chasing members of the Triads through the streets of Hong Kong. Rather than disappearing into a crowd, the Triads decide to climb up some scaffolding. Lee follows them, leading to a really great aerial fight sequence. Nobody has ever been better at making use of their environment during a fight scene than Jackie Chan. Whatever happens to be in the area when you’re fighting him is something he’s gonna use to beat you up.⁵ 

11:27: I know Kobe Bryant attended the official Rush Hour 2 premiere in Los Angeles because there are pictures of him and his wife, Vanessa, there on Getty Images. That means over the course of just 14 months, he (a) won the first NBA championship of his career; (b) then he got married; and then (c) he got name-dropped in Rush Hour 2 while at the actual premiere for the movie. What a stretch for him.  

11:28: P.S. You know who I was surprised to see attended the Rush Hour 2 premiere while I was clicking through the photos? Steven Seagal. He’s become such a weirdo over the past 20 or so years that you kind of forget that there was a point when he was just a regular Hollywood star. 

13:21: Back in 2005, there was a big battle rap showdown between a guy named Serius Jones (a legendary battler from New Jersey) and a guy named MC Jin (an electrifying young talent of Chinese descent who’d flipped a string of consecutive victories on BET’s Freestyle Friday segment on 106 & Park into a record deal with Ruff Ryders Entertainment). Things were set to be a proper clash, but Jones—one of the sharpest, meanest, most vicious battle rappers on the planet—ended things before they even got started by commenting on the lackluster performance of Jin’s debut album with the following: 

I said you’re broke / That's why you wanna come back and battle over here / But you been wack your whole career / Ain’t it two billion people in China? / You can’t even go platinum over there?!

It’s a fucking vicious line. (Somehow, though, it was only, like, the sixth-meanest thing Jones said to Jin during the battle. The whole thing is on YouTube, if you wanna watch it.) But I mention it right now to say: Carter, annoyed that Lee has been trying to catch Ricky Tan while he’s supposed to be treating Carter to some vacation time, just sniped at Lee, “There’s two billion Chinese people here. Let one of them be your partner.” I wonder if Jones was thinking of that line when he wrote his line?

15:10: Lee (still looking for Ricky Tan) brought Carter to a massage parlor where you get to choose the person who massages you. Two women open a secret door to reveal this: 

15:20: Four questions here:

1. Do these women all just sit there behind the door all day waiting for the two bosses to open it? That hardly seems like a useful way to spend your time.

2. Most of the women (but, importantly, not all of the women) are wearing pink. Does that mean there’s a dress code and a couple of the women didn’t follow it? Or maybe is each person’s outfit color an indication of massage skill level, as in blue = beginner, pink = advanced, and black = top level?

3. What happens if they’re all sitting there waiting for the two bosses to open the door and one of the women in the middle has to go to the bathroom? Do they have an organized way to exit the bleachers like in middle school when you’d take the big panoramic picture and exit by rows, or do they just clumsily step past everyone like at sporting events?

4. And who told this lady that this wig was a good idea?

17:38: Here we go, baby. It’s time for the massage parlor fight scene. This is the most fun, most dynamic combat sequence in the movie. Since Lee and Carter go up against 11 guys, let’s hit the 11 best parts of this moment: 

1. When Carter walks up to Ricky Tan, and, rather than introduce himself, he just sharply says, “Ricky? Ricky Tan? Get up, dog. Come on. Let’s go. I been looking for you everywhere. Let’s go.” 

2. The timbre of Ricky Tan’s voice. (It’s a great Bad Guy voice. It’s that thing where it sounds simultaneously soft but menacing.)

3. The bit where Carter starts destroying Tan’s laptop and all of Tan’s henchmen stand up behind Carter…

4. But then Tan waves them off and they all sit back down before Carter sees them.

5. When Carter grabs Ricky Tan and all his henchmen make themselves known, and so Carter, surprised by the amount of them, starts caressing Tan softly as he regretfully mumbles, “Ohhhh my lord.”

6. When Carter and Lee decide the only chance they have against the henchmen is if they sneak attack them, so they pretend to argue with each other for a second and then just start punching dudes at random. And to that point…

7. When Carter accidentally punches Lee in the face after the fight breaks out because he gets him confused with the others. (It’s the inverse of the moment in the original Rush Hour when all the henchmen have Carter surrounded and one of them kicks him in the face, at which point he recoils, gathers his wits, then asks, “Which one of y’all kicked me?”)

8. The sequence where Lee uses an ottoman, a recliner, and a bucket as weapons.

9. Anytime two guys are both trying to punch Lee at the same time and he has to simultaneously ward both of them off. (This is something that happens in every Jackie Chan karate movie. I love it. It’s crazy how fast he is. It’s like his arms have motors in them.) 

10. When Carter yanks one of the henchmen’s towels off, sees his dick, then says, “No wonder you’re mad,” then whips him in the dick with the towel. (This poor guy gets disrobed, then gets whipped in the face with the towel he was just wearing, then gets his dick made fun of in front of everyone, then gets whipped in the dick with the towel. It’s the worst adding-insult-to-injury thing that’s ever happened to anyone in any movie ever.) 

11. And the way Carter celebrates after Lee helps him do his first flip in a fight. (I’ve seen this movie 20 times easily. I laugh at this part every single time.)

24:21: More copies of People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive are being delivered, except this time it’s the 1990 issue (Tom Cruise).  

26:22: Lee thinks that Carter died in the latest bombing attack. What’s the worst thing you ever thought happened to someone you knew, but then it turned out it didn’t actually happen? For me, one time I knew a guy who I thought had become a Dallas Mavericks fan, but then it turned out he’d only actually died in a car crash, not become a Dallas Mavericks fan, and so I felt a lot better about things. 

27:57: Lee is driving around in a state of grief because of Carter’s assumed passing. As he does, Puff Daddy’s “I’ll Be Missing You” comes on the radio. The video for that song curiously starts with Puff⁶ driving a motorcycle down an empty road—and then all of a sudden, he crashes. Growing up, a buddy of mine was super into motorcycles, and every time that video came on he would point out that Puff caused the crash himself by tapping the front tire brake with his right hand and then yanking the handlebars to the side.

29:48: Roselyn Sanchez is here. She plays Isabella Molina, an undercover member of the Secret Service. There was a moment in the early 2000s where it seemed like Sanchez was headed toward a big career as a movie star, but by four years after Rush Hour 2, you could pretty much only find her in B movie stuff. (My theory is that all the roles she would’ve gotten otherwise, ended up going to Eva Mendes.)

29:49: P.S. To expand on the previous parenthetical: Both Sanchez and Mendes were in interracial buddy cop movies in 2001 (Sanchez had Rush Hour 2, Mendes had Training Day). Sanchez followed it up with Boat Trip (nope), Nightstalker (nope), Basic (I enjoyed it, but I think I might’ve been the only person who did), Chasing Papi (nope), and Larceny (nope). Mendes had All About the Benjamins (fun), 2 Fast 2 Furious (massive hit), Once Upon a Time in Mexico (decent hit), Out of Time (not a huge hit, but she was starring opposite Denzel Washington again, which is always a good place to be), Stuck on You (the only real “miss” here, but even as a miss it still didn’t lose money at the box office), and Hitch (a rom-com she led with Will Smith that generated $371 million!!!).  

29:50: P.P.S. Hannah pointed out while editing this that there was also another Eva in play here: Eva Longoria. Sanchez auditioned for the role of Gabrielle Solis in Desperate Housewives, but it ended up going to Longoria. That means Roselyn Sanchez lost out on roles to Eva Mendes and Eva Longoria. And that means…

okay, here it comes…
get ready…
I’m about to make the best joke I have ever made in my entire career…
get ready…
wait for it…
here it comes…

Roselyn Sanchez losing out on roles to Eva Mendes and Eva Longoria means that Roselyn was… the lesser of two Evas, ayooooooooo.⁷ 

33:13: The most famous line from the original Rush Hour is when Carter meets Lee for the first time and, after getting no response to his first few comments, he loudly and slowly says, “Do you understand the words that are coming out of my mouth?” Lee just threw that line back at Carter here. (Same as earlier, the theater I was watching this in went fucking bonkers for it.)

35:01: Oftentimes, whenever I’m watching a movie (in particular, any sort of action movie), my IS THIS GUY REALLY DEAD radar is on high alert. I refuse to believe anybody is fully dead until I see them fully die. This one tricked me, though. When Hu Li shoots Ricky Tan in the chest and then Ricky falls into water off the back of the boat, I was 100 percent certain he was dead. 

35:02: P.S. One time in college, I was home on a break during the summer and went to the lake with my parents. My dad had rented a boat, and as he was driving us around on the water, I got the sudden urge to jump out. (He was going maybe 20 or so miles per hour.) I said, “Dad, I’m gonna jump out of this boat.” He said, “Don’t do it,” but before he could finish, I was already airborne. I assumed that it’d feel the same as when you jump into the water off a diving board or whatever. But let me tell you: It did not feel like that. It was like I’d jumped out of a moving car. My body skipped across the top of that water like a stone. That shit fucking hurt. 

37:24: This is one of those movies where the details of the plot aren’t especially important, but still: Lee just admitted to Carter that the reason he’s been so dead set on capturing Ricky Tan is because Tan, who used to be a Hong Kong cop alongside Lee’s father, is responsible for his father’s death. Look how sad Jackie Chan is here. 😔😔😔😔

38:57: “Lee, let me introduce you to Carter’s Theory of Criminal Investigation: Follow the rich white man. … Every big crime has a rich white man behind it waiting for his cut.” That’s a thing Carter just said. One of my main dreams in life is to be a rich white man waiting to receive my cut for the crime I’ve orchestrated from behind the shadows. I would love to be that. I can’t wait to be that.

41:03: Lee, while surveilling a bad guy, winds up watching Isabella undress in her hotel room. It’s weird seeing Jackie Chan be horny, especially under such creepy circumstances.

42:16: Okay, here’s a philosophical question for you: In this scene, the woman who’s been delivering bombs throughout Rush Hour 2 shows up to Isabella’s hotel room and hands her a package. Lee and Carter happen to see it because they’re being peeping toms, and so they run to her room, kick the door down, then take the bomb to try and dispose of it. If you found out someone was peeping on you, but the result of them peeping on you was that they somehow saved your life, would you press charges against them? Or would you call it a fair trade?

42:53: Just a small thing to point out here: After Lee and Carter grab what they believe is a bomb meant to kill Isabella, they run into some housekeepers in a stairwell. Carter, trying to help them, shouts for them to get out of the building. 

Now, Carter trying to help someone is not out of the ordinary—he consistently proves himself to be a kind, caring, compassionate person across the Rush Hour movies. What is new, though, is that when Carter shouts his instructions, he does so in Spanish. (“Bájate! Bájate, señora!”) Carter secretly being a language nerd is a surprising little character tick that becomes very obvious when you think back on all the times that Carter would earnestly ask Lee what a word meant, or when he’d flip through an English/Cantonese travel guide to figure out what someone was saying, or when he’d try and speak Cantonese himself.

44:00: Turns out, it wasn’t a bomb that was being delivered. It was counterfeit money. Isabella is an undercover agent with the Secret Service who’s working to bring down the Triad smuggling ring. The bad guys think she’s a crooked customs agent. 

48:00: Don Cheadle’s here. He plays Kenny, the owner of a Chinese soul food restaurant in Los Angeles. Let’s do this scene for this week’s FOOTNOTES:

This movie is so much fun.

51:40: Ernie Reyes Jr. is here. He’s a low-level star in Hollywood overall, but a very important figure in the action genre. He was in, among other things, The Last Dragon, Red Sonja, a couple different roles across the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movies, and The Rundown. 

53:40: After Lee and Carter get captured by Hu Li, Carter, fussing at Lee about their circumstances, threatens to slap him. Lee thinks about everything for a second, searches his brain for an appropriate retaliatory response, then snipes, “I’ll bitch-slap you back to Africa!” One of the signature traits of the Rush Hour franchise is all the casual intra-POC racism. The trick of it, though, is that it rarely (if ever) feels mean-spirited. And that’s owed to the chemistry between Chan and Tucker, who seem like genuine friends. It makes the barbs they toss back and forth at one another feel more like light-hearted banter than insults.

58:33: Another dream of mine is to crawl up out of a manhole during an adventure. If I could somehow work that into my other dream of being a rich white man behind a lucrative crime, that would be awesome. 

59:45: Jeremy Piven is here. He plays a sales associate in a high-end clothing store. If you’re organizing a Things To Be Offended By From This Movie list, is his character number one on that list? Yes, right? Because the joke here is “haha he’s gay haha.”(It’s the philosophical opposite of what I was talking about in the 53:40 timestamp.)

1:04:18: I love a good craps scene in a movie. The CRAPS SCENE IN A MOVIE podium:

• The honorable mention spot goes to the craps scene in Indecent Proposal. (Having Robert Redford decide he wants to sleep with the woman you love is nearly as bad as getting whipped in the dick with a towel.) 

• The bronze medal spot goes to the craps scene in Harlem Nights. (Redd Foxx being a little bit blind is hilarious.) 

• The silver medal spot goes to the craps scene in Hard Eight. (Phillip Seymour Hoffman is an absolute maniac in this.)

• The gold medal spot goes to the craps scene in Casino. (Sharon Stone is a stick of dynamite.)

• And the super gold medal spot goes to the craps scene in A Bronx Tale. (Pure perfection, all the way through.) 

1:07:24: One of the main benefits of having Jackie Chan in your movie is if at any point you start to feel things dragging, you can just go, “Uh, okay, let’s just throw a bunch of dudes at Jackie and let him fight them all at once.” It’s an incredibly high hit rate.

1:08:01: Oh no. Hu Li is delivering her worst bomb yet (a golf ball-sized grenade she tapes inside of Lee’s mouth that will, as she explains to him, “blow 32 teeth into your brain” if she clicks the detonator).  

1:09:28: Ricky Tan not only still being alive, but also being the main bad guy secretly behind the rich white guy is a legitimately great twist. Here’s my question, though: Why? Why did Ricky Tan pretend like Hu Li murdered him? What purpose did it serve? Was it solely to get Lee to stop looking into him? And if so, again: Why? Would anything at all have been different if he never staged his own fake assassination? Is he just a very showy guy? Dribbling behind his back when a normal dribble would work just fine? Is he the Ricky Davis of bad guys? Someone please explain this to me.

1:12:13: Right when Hu Li prepares to detonate the grenade in Lee’s mouth, he grabs and pulls her up against his face, making it impossible for her to set it off without also killing herself. It’s a brilliant defensive strategy, the kind of thing that makes you go, “You know what? I’m having a fucking great time watching this movie.”

1:13:12: This whole sequence where Lee is running around with a bomb taped into his mouth and his hands taped into fists is just so fucking good. It’s frenetic and chaotic and tumultuous and awesome. Jackie Chan really is something special.

1:15:04: Hu Li’s back. And she is FUCKING PISSED. It’s time for her to face off against Carter, which ends up being the second-best fight of the movie. These final 20 or so minutes when they finally give Zhang Ziyi some stuff to do… just great.

1:18:52: You know what I love in action movies? When the good guy has the bad guy completely at his mercy, but the bad guy knows the good guy is a good guy, meaning he won’t kill the bad guy, and so the bad guy just starts saying the wildest, most antagonistic shit. (In this case, Ricky Tan is talking about Lee’s dead father in very disrespectful terms.) 

1:20:20: JUSTICE, BABYYYYYYYYYYYY. Ricky Tan was able to snatch the gun away from Lee because Carter was distracting him, but before Tan could shoot Lee or Carter, Lee karate kicked him out the fucking window

…sending him plummeting several hundred feet to his death.

He’s dead for real now, thank God. 

1:20:43: Hu Li’s back again. And she’s even MORE PISSED than the last time she was back. She’s got a big bomb now, and she’s ready to blow up EVERYBODY

1:21:00: Carter and Lee escaped Hu Li’s suicide bomber move by jumping out of the window that Lee karate kicked Ricky Tan out of. They’re currently zip lining down toward the ground. (This is an important screengrab because if you look at their faces, you can see the difference in the type of action actors that Chan and Tucker are. Chan looks absolutely terrified. He looks like he’s really and truly careening down an impromptu zip line while a building blows up behind him in the real world. Tucker looks like he’s pretending to zip line in a very safe ropes course while a pretend building pretendly blows up behind him on a pretend movie set somewhere.)

1:21:35: The final great gag in a movie stuffed fat with great gags: the zipline fiasco ends with Lee and Carter dangling fifteen or so feet in the air directly in the middle of the street. As an oncoming 18 wheeler prepares to crash into them, Chan kicks Tucker, the resulting force of which sends them to opposite sides of the 18 wheeler. On Lee’s side, we see him very smoothly and very coolly run along the side of the truck…

When the camera cuts to the other side, we see Carter just sort of crashing into the side of the shipping container over and over again…

A perfectly executed gag. 

1:22:18: Lee and Carter are saying goodbye to each other in the airport. 🥹 🥹 🥹

1:24:31: And one final nod to the original Rush Hour (the scene where the two officially become buddies ends with them walking off dancing with their hands in the air). 

1:24:39: The movie’s over. Good movie. 

UNEXPECTED SIMILARITIES
Things that last week’s movie (Parasite) has in common with this week’s movie 

• Both movies are set somewhere in Asia.

• Both movies have scenes where someone gets stabbed.

• Both movies have scenes where someone gets kicked, eventually resulting in that person’s death from their fall-related injuries.

• Both movies have scenes where someone lies about their real identity.

• Both movies have scenes where a guy kisses someone he is romantically interested in but ultimately does not end up with.

• Both movies have scenes where someone gets a massage.

THE LAST BITS
Things that I Googled while watching Rush Hour 2

• Has Jackie Chan ever done a sex scene in a movie? I searched this when he was peeping on Isabella. I expected the answer to be no, but it turns out he has. He was in a raunchy comedy movie very early in his career that had a sex scene in it. (This has somehow morphed into an internet myth about how he was in a pornographic movie once, which is not true.)

• Chris Tucker filmography. For some reason, I had in my head that Tucker had filmed other stuff during the nine-year period when the Rush Hour trilogy unfolded, but nope. Those were the only three movies he did from 1998 to 2007. 

• Did Zhang Ziyi win an Oscar for her role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon? She did not. In fact, she wasn’t even nominated. 

• Why isn’t Pappadeaux on DoorDash? I got hungry while I was working on this and wanted some Pappadeaux but it wasn’t showing up as an option on DoorDash. 

• What’s the highest height someone has fallen from before and not died? I looked this one up after Ricky Tan fell to his death. I couldn’t find a verifiable answer for someone falling from a building or whatever, but I did find a story about a flight attendant named Vesna Vulovic who survived a plane crash from over 33,000 feet in the air after a briefcase bomb went off and tore the plane apart. She got pinned in the fuselage by a food trolley, and also she passed out from having low blood pressure, and those two things combined somehow helped her to survive the fall. She was the only person on the flight who didn’t die.

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Next week’s movie: Ex Machina

You can rent Ex Machina from everywhere you rent movies from.

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This essay was edited by Hannah Giorgis. The FOOTNOTES video was produced by Richie Bozek.

1. This is the first time a GOOD MOVIE Signature Line has come from a blooper reel.

2. Most notably Roger Ebert, who gave the film three out of four stars and praised Chan and Tucker’s performances.

3. An interesting stat: If you take the six movies Jackie Chan had done immediately before Rush Hour and add up all the money they made at the box office combined, that cumulative amount is still less than what Rush Hour earned on its own.

4. That said, I will point out here that Roger Ebert did not like it at all.

5. My favorite example of this is the scene in 1996’s First Strike where he beats a bunch of guys up with a fucking ladder.

6. In the last ten years, both Puff Daddy and Brett Ratner, the director of the Rush Hour films, have been accused of sexual assault by multiple people.

7. Hahahahahahaha. (I’m so sorry.) (The joke honestly doesn’t even really make total sense you if you think about it for more than two seconds.) (But I don’t care.)