Rush Hour 2
Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) is on vacation in Hong Kong with his old friend Detective Lee (Jackie Chan). When the local Triads bomb the American Embassy and kill two agents the duo get entangled in a case that leads them back to L.A. and on
Plot
Detective James Carter (Chris Tucker) is on vacation in Hong Kong with his old friend Detective Lee (Jackie Chan). When the local Triads bomb the American Embassy and kill two agents the duo get entangled in a case that leads them back to L.A. and onto Las Vegas.
They soon find out that they’ve stumbled upon a counterfeiting plot involving successful businessman Stephen Reign and Triad Boss Ricky Tan. When they meet up with a female secret service agent the big question is can they trust her or not.
Video/Audio
As you would expect with any release of a new Hollywood blockbuster there’s nothing really to complain about with regards to the video quality. Colours are rich, detail is sharp and there’s no evidence of compression problem. The film is presented in its original 2.35:1 Widescreen format and is Anamorphically enhanced.
The DTS ES 6.1 is very nice, there’s plenty of use of all channels with some nice thumping of the subwoofer throughout. All dialogue is crisp and clear and well there’s not much else to say really as it’s a top-notch audio track.
Extras
The Commentary track is from Director Brett Ratner and Writer Jeff Nathanson. It is a reasonably interesting commentary, not the best I’ve sat through but certainly by no means the worst. There’s plenty of background info about cast and crew and there’s a few interesting stories about some of the things that happened during the shooting (like two stuntmen getting sucked under the boat). Both director and writer talk energetically and enthusiastically and there are hardly any long silent stretches.
Jackie Chan’s Honk Kong Introduction is like something you would expect the Hong Kong tourist board to put together. It’s a 2-minute video of the sites and sounds of Hing Kong with a Jackie Chan voice over. Culture Clash and Language Barrier are very similar 4-minute peaces that deal with cultural differences between the US and Asian crew, how they coped with filming in Hong Kong and the language problems they faced.
Attaining International Stardom is a 7-minute long feature that mainly focuses on how Jackie Chan achieved the international stardom that he has now. Kung Fu Choreography is a 9-Minute feature that as you can probably guess deals with the choreography of the fight scenes in the film. Jackie Chan talks about how he always goes for believable stunts unlike the fantasy style of fights you find in films like Crouching Tiger for example.
Lady Luck is a black and white silent film that Brett Ratner created when he was a student; it is about 2 minutes long and contains a commentary from Brett. Making Magic out of the Mire is a 9-minute long feature that basically consists of cast & crew (and himself) praising Brett Ratner and discussing how great a director he is. Evolution of a scene is one of the best features here; it’s broken out into three separate scenes with some very comprehensive behind the scenes footage of that particular scene. Fashion of Rush Hour 2, as you can imagine this is a feature on the fashion styles used in the film, it runs for around 3-minutes.
Visual Effects Deconstruction is a very short effects demo of the building explosion at the beginning of the film. It is split into four angles containing the original building scene, two angles of the model exploding and then the final film sequence. There’s a selection of nine short Deleted Scenes and an Outtakes reel, the deleted scenes all have a director’s commentary. Finally there’s a selection of three trailers and some cast & crew bios. There are also two Easter eggs that contain trailers for Lord of the Rings and details can be found in our Hidden Extras section.
The film is broken into sixteen chapters and contains subtitles in English. Once again New Line has supplied a nice little set of extras, some of them are not up to much but overall they are well worth sitting through, particularly the Evolution of a Scene and the Directors Commentary.
Overall
I have to say that I wasn’t particularly looking forward to watching this film. I’d never seen the first one but from watching the trailers for this sequel it looked like typical cheesy Hollywood fluff. To be honest it is actually Cheesy Hollywood fluff, but it’s well paced, action packed and extremely funny Hollywood fluff.
Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker work very well off each other. For example, between Jackie and Chris there are lots of basically racist comments towards each other. However, because of the friendship between them they just come across as funny japes rather than offensive comments. There’s also some very good supporting cast that really look the part, John Lone looks particularly mean as Ricky Tan and Ziyi Zhang (Crouching Tiger), even though she doesn’t speak a word of English always comes across as a woman you wouldn’t want to mess with.
With the combination of a good fun film, very good quality audio and video and a nice selection of extras I can wholeheartedly recommend this disk. It’s probably not one that you’re going to revisit time and again, but if your looking for a good fun, fast paced, buddy cop movie with some martial arts thrown in then they don’t come much better than this.
This film was supplied for review by VIEWDVD. VIEWDVD is a UK based online rental service with over 2500 titles in stock. They have a fixed monthly membership service with pricing starting at just £10 per month. You can order as many titles as you choose and there is no limited rental period.
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