I remember loving the holy hell out of RUSH HOUR back when it released in 1998. This was also when “Jackie Chan Adventures” was one of the many awesome Saturday Morning Cartoons available and so by the time 2000 rolled around Jackie Chan had, in effect, stolen my heart with his awkwardly bumbling badassery.
Now here we are, fourteen years later, and Jackie Chan has announced that his career in terms of straight action movies is over though he’ll still be seen in more character driven pieces that have an action element to the story. Chan has several ongoing franchises that might still fit that bill, one of them of course being the RUSH HOUR series with Chris Tucker. There have been three installments so far, descending in critical reception as they came, but producer/creator Arthur Sarkissian isn’t letting reviews or Chan’s new career specificiations slow him down as he searches for a plot.
“I am working on Rush Hour 4 right now… I’m trying to do it closer to how I did Rush Hour 1, more down to earth, more gritty, introduce two new characters and make it real the way the first one was. I personally was not happy with the third one. I thought 1 and 2 were very good. I think 3 got out of hand a little bit. It’s not a matter of just bringing them back to do another segment of that or a sequel to it by putting them in another city and having them bicker. I don’t want that. I want something new.”
As for what that “something new” might be: “Maybe younger, maybe Chris is now married, maybe Jackie is married to Octavia Spencer, I don’t know. Married to Chris’s cousin, they live in Shanghai, Chris goes out to visit them. I don’t know, I want something energetic.”
Is there a script: “Right now we haven’t decided yet but I’m very close to making a decision. I have about four or five names that we’re roaming on right now.”
Could director Brett Ratner be back: “If he wants to do it he’s more than welcome to do it but he’s got to do it in the right way.”
Any way and either way, “Sarkissian confirmed Tucker and Chan are interested in returning,” so you can probably look for more news soon on the RUSH HOUR 4 front.
Noémie Lenoir, star of RUSH HOUR 3 and possibly my French-filled dreams.