Jackie Chan’s First Strike (1996) + Rush Hour (1998) [New Line Platinum Series] – DVDs

First Strike
**½/**** Image B Sound A-
starring Jackie Chan, Chen Chun Wu, Jackson Lou
screenplay by Stanley Tong, Nick Tramontane, Greg Mellott, and Elliot Tong
directed by Stanley Tong

RUSH HOUR
*½/**** Image A Sound A Extras A+
starring Jackie Chan, Chris Tucker, Tom Wilkinson, Elizabeth Peña
screenplay by Jim Kouf and Ross LaManna
directed by Brett Ratner

by Bill Chambers Early on in Rush Hour, the smash-hit buddy-cop movie from last fall, there’s a shot of Jackie Chan clinging tenaciously to a Hollywood street sign as he dangles several feet above the L.A. traffic. It’s a powerful metaphor for Chan’s career: Rush Hour represents his last-ditch effort to become a Stateside action star after finally finding a measure of Hollywood success with the popularity of HK imports like Rumble in the Bronx and Supercop. (Indeed, Chan includes said image in the colour stills portion of his autobiography I Am Jackie Chan, annotated by this caption: “On the set of Rush Hour–hanging on to another chance at Hollywood success.”) This final gamble, after striking out in the early-’80s with Cannonball Run II and The Big Brawl, his English-language debut, paid off handsomely. But why?

Maybe it was the teaming of Jackie with rising comic star Chris Tucker, late of Friday, The Fifth Element, and, perhaps most auspiciously, Jackie Brown. Maybe it was the fact that American audiences have always wanted to like Jackie Chan more but couldn’t tolerate the lesser English dubs his native hits have received abroad; now was their chance to hear Jackie speak in his own voice, with his lip movements matching the dialogue. Maybe it was the lack of competition when the film opened during the September doldrums. Whatever the reason, Rush Hour was a sleeper hit, grossing over $100M domestically. Everybody loved it. Except this reviewer.

First, let’s discuss Jackie Chan’s First Strike, concurrently released with Rush Hour on DVD last Tuesday after a brief theatrical run in January of 1997. New Line, the distributor of both films, is the only Hollywood studio that knows how to sell Jackie to the masses: “No stuntman! No equal!” trumpeted the ads for Rumble in the Bronx. Similar phrasing was used to hawk Mr. Nice Guy and First Strike. These pictures are hit-and-miss affairs, of course, though I have a soft spot (make that weakness) for Jackie’s Hong Kong fight-fests. New Line is also the only distributor that bothers to give their Jackie titles top-notch video transfers, although, like Miramax, they have liberated these Hong Kong productions of their cultural idiosyncrasies (First Strike used to run 23 minutes longer than it does on New Line’s DVD) and denied viewers any option to watch them subtitled with their original soundtrack.

First Strike is essentially a dime-a-dozen parody of James Bond films. Jackie plays a guy named, you guessed it, Jackie, hired by the CIA for his…martial arts skills to stop the Russian mafia. The Cold War is just beginning for our hero: the baddies (posing as KGB agents) have stolen, among other things, a nuclear missile. Somehow this leads Jackie to Australia, where he befriends a Koala bear (Ford Fairlane, we hardly knew ya), fights sharks, destroys a Chinese parade, and encounters, quote the snapper case, “heart-stopping beauties.” That it took four people to write First Strike may sound as ridiculous as 32 writers having churned out the Flintstones movie, but that’s two people to write the story into corners and two people to figure out how to get out of those corners.

Against my better judgment, I am ever so fond of First Strike. It’s iconoclastic in a way that even the Leslie Nielsen spoof Spy Hard is not. Jackie is trapped in a deadly shark tank only to be attacked by a…seal! Homing devices are hidden in…Jackie’s briefs! Jackie allows himself to look surprisingly inept on the slopes, unlike Roger Moore in The Spy Who Loved Me or A View to a Kill; a thrilling jump to a helicopter isn’t so much the money shot of a great set-piece as an attempt to save face after a tumble. Jackie is the class clown with a death wish. If anything, that’s why First Strike‘s kung fu is so immediate and impressive: When the moment calls for it, Jackie transforms himself from a bumbling idiot into a fighter with Fred Astaire’s grace. Any old object in the room (in First Strike‘s case, ladders) becomes a deadly weapon or effective defense mechanism in Jackie’s capable hands. Director Stanley Tong, who also helmed the aforementioned Rumble in the Bronx, delivers one of the more ambitious Chan vehicles in First Strike, although this abbreviated version is not especially well-paced, taking a bit too long for my liking before Jackie gets to strut his stuff. Sometimes the irony of shortening a film is that it ends up feeling longer.

Not as long as Rush Hour does, granted. The worst enemies Jackie has ever faced turn out to be…Tucker, his Rush Hour co-star, and Ratner, the movie’s director. Though Tucker, in the right hands, is a scene-stealer rather than a limelight-hog, Ratner, like Luc Besson before him, is stupefied by his loud energy, which must be a camera magnet. With his Cruella DeVil eyebrows and Cheshire Cat’s grin, Tucker has a face that torques the laughs, but in Rush Hour he’s running on fumes. He talks and talks and talks and talks without anything resembling a joke ever spilling out of his mouth. Tucker does enough talking for him and Jackie, both, which may be by design to smooth over the language barrier but muffles first-billed Chan’s other gifts. A climax that finds Jackie taking on several henchmen at once while juggling priceless Ming vases sticks out like Van Gogh’s “Starry Night” would on the wall of a sports bar.

In Rush Hour, Tucker’s Carter is a cop assigned to babysit Inspector Lee (Chan–is that the only name American writers can come up with for a Chinese tough guy? (see also: Chow Yun Fat in The Replacement Killers)), who has come to America in search of a kidnapped diplomat’s daughter. Peroxide-blonde ransomer Sang (Ken Leung) is after big money, and the FBI would prefer to catch him without foreign aid. Carter’s assignment is a punishment of sorts for having destroyed half a city block via a C-4 explosion that apparently didn’t kill anybody and so becomes a big joke better suited to Last Action Hero.

Not a single thing happens in Rush Hour that you haven’t seen before. That’s not always a bad thing–the New Teen Cinema has offered a few welcome throwbacks–but Rush Hour is a cover band generically playing the old hits rather than the masters of the form, Jackie excluded. It’s racist, too. When Tucker busts into a room and says to Sang, “I’m gonna kick your sweet-and-sour chicken ass,” it doesn’t matter that he’s talking to the bad guys, it’s an unbearably squirmy moment. What if Jackie had pointed a gun at Chris Tucker and declared, “I’m gonna kick your watermelon and fried chicken ass!”? I don’t think Ratner appreciates what he has in Jackie Chan (or Tucker, for that matter), so he defaults to a minstrel show consistent with his hackery. Asian-Americans deserve so much better than warmed-over “flied lice” jokes.

THE DVDs
In fact, New Line’s Rush Hour DVD is chock-full of extras that have helped me assign blame for the picture’s mediocrity (and casual racism) squarely on director Ratner. During his feature-length commentary, he admits to surrounding himself on shoots with a crew of veterans so that he may “learn from them.” Translation: he covers his ass. With the cinematographer of T2, Jackie Chan, the stunt coordinator for Raiders of the Lost Ark, and Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy producer Roger Birnbaum on his team, he still comes up short. He talks about having begged the severely underrated Chris Penn to cameo, only to give a gracious Penn the worst part he’s had since imitating brother Sean’s Jeff Spicoli in The Wild Life, the botched sequel to Fast Times at Ridgemont High. The clincher is when Ratner discusses Polish cinematographer Greenberg’s “bad” accent–not his thick one, his bad one.

Ratner’s NYU thesis short is also included on this Platinum Series edition. It’s a 10-minute piece called Whatever Happened to Mason Reese?. Reese was a ’70s child star, a sort of white Webster. He looked four when he was twelve. Ratner’s film pretends that Reese is now living in the lap of luxury, surrounded by models and chauffered everywhere by limousine. He is also a hero to “short people” in this film, which is why Michael Anderson (the backwards-talking dwarf on TV’s “Twin Peaks”) co-stars as a chef at a Japanese restaurant who worships the by-now grotesque Reese. Ratner introduces the film and sets the story straight on Steven Spielberg’s finanicial participation in the project–it’s a story that leaves you incredulous, in part because Ratner didn’t even recognize the name of Amblin head Kathleen Kennedy when she called him! What a fan.

In his commentary for Reese, Ratner reveals that his favourite shot is the one of Anderson struggling to reach a chef’s hat hung too high for him. That kind of lowbrow, school-bully wit is this shithead’s specialty. Ratner does offer one amusing anecdote, however: Reese grabbed one of the model’s breasts during a take, inciting her to put him in a leg-lock, snapping his leg in two! That led to the injured Reese refusing to loop his dialogue; Anthony Michael Hall redubbed his entire track in a sort of Donald Duck soprano. A pedigreed turd, Whatever Happened to Mason Reese? resulted in a career directing rap and hip-hop videos, two of which are included here: Dru Hill‘s “How Deep is Your Love” and a Heavy D song. (The latter is unlisted on the box.) Ratner provides blustery commentary for these, too.

The best element of the Rush Hour package is without a doubt Josh Lobis and Mark Rance’s 40-minute making-of documentary, “A Piece of the Action: Behind the Scenes of Rush Hour“, the highlight of which is a fly-on-the-wall segment in which Jackie choreographs the Chinese restaurant battle. Jackie imported his stunt gang from Hong Kong and they have a rapport that verges on telepathic–they know exactly what they’re doing, how it will look, when to cut the shot, etc. This is one of the most insightful supplements I’ve ever seen, a valuable tool for young filmmakers or aspiring stunt-people. When Ratner asks Jackie, “Is it your gun?” and Jackie shoos him away with a pained “who cares” expression, it demonstrates perfectly what separates the Eastern and Western priorities: Jackie wants to execute a complex and visceral fight, while Ratner is concerned about the firearm. This video incidentally suggests that Ratner–who apparently spent most of his time on set in a ridiculous Michelin Man ski jacket that makes him look George in the Gortex coat on “Seinfeld”–encouraged the shy-seeming Tucker to overplay every line.

More content: three minutes of deleted scenes–all incomprehensibly edited out, as they are no worse than anything that made it into the final cut and would in some cases have improved the proceedings. (See: the additional scene at Elizabeth Peña’s apartment, which gives these wooden characters a hint of dimension even in just showing where they live.) A second full-length audio commentary features Rush Hour‘s kitschy composer Lalo Schifrin (of “Theme from ‘Mission: Impossible'” fame), who, with his bad accent, is a little difficult to understand at times, though it’s nice to see this often-overlooked piece of the pie recognized.

Lastly, you can watch the trailer for the film. If you have a PC DVD-ROM, enjoy:

-The screenplay
-Say What: an interactive trivia game
-Don’t Blow It: a race against time game
-In-depth information on Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker
-Web links

Rush Hour looks great on my fave format. With the exception of white highlights running a little too hot at times, I found no fault with the 2.35:1 letterboxed, 16×9-enhanced presentation. First Strike is more problematic: Although anamorphic (and 2.35:1 as well), occasionally the image is soft (and downright blurry on the blown-up pan-and-scan alternative) and a tad murky, with shadow detail at a minimum during the darkest scenes. On the audio end of the spectrum, Rush Hour continues to be the superior DVD, with 5.1 discrete effects aplenty and thundering bass during the explosions and gun blasts. (A fine 2.0 surround option never sounds compressed or hollow.) Both discs are RSDL, and despite testimonies to the contrary, I noticed no layer-switch during Rush Hour. Die-hard Jackie fans will want both discs.

• First Strike
  84 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced), 1.33:1; English DD 5.1, French Dolby Surround; CC; English, French, Spanish subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; New Line
• Rush Hour
  97 minutes; PG-13; 2.35:1 (16×9-enhanced); English DD 5.1, English Dolby Surround; CC; English subtitles; DVD-9; Region One; New Line