DVDs We Love: Rush Hour 2 (2001)

This should be an easy transition: as you know, we've spent the last few weeks on Code Redd Net revisiting some Classic Chan films. Now we return with a new recurring feature, one that aims to spotlight some of the best, most valuable and most interesting DVDs/Blu-rays on the market. Too often films released for home viewing provide little incentive for purchase beyond the quality of the film it contains. Our purpose here is to draw your attention to those discs laden with special features, special features that make repeated viewings worthwhile, that keep the DVD/Blu-ray in question spinning in your player for years. To that end, we can find no better way to kick things off than by returning to Rush Hour 2. In addition to being a beloved CRN Awards winner and longtime site/blog staple, it's also one of our favorite DVDs ever released. Find out why below.

Ricky, you sly son of a gun, just look at you.

Rush Hour 2 is not the best Jackie Chan film. In fact, looking over the items chronicled in our recent Classic Chan series, arguably eight of those ten films feature better fights, better stunts, and overall a more competent use of Chan's physical abilities. What those films lack, though, is the sheen of Rush Hour 2, its efficiency of storytelling and style. Undeniably, Rush Hour 2 is lean Hollywood filmmaking, all its excesses contained in 90 minutes and rounded off by the credits. Hollywood is at its best when taking something mediocre and inflating it to the absolute limit, usually via astronomical production values. So while Chan's choreography is below average in this film, so much else around him is of a higher quality (everything from the lighting, the sets, the cameras, to the film stock itself) that we can temporarily forget the handcuffs put on our favorite action star. It's a decent enough compromise for the Chan enthusiast and the casual viewer, I suppose.

Besides the quality of the film, the DVD for Rush Hour 2 really delivers the goods. As part of the abandoned Infinifilm brand of New Line, the Rush Hour 2 disc is loaded with stuff:

• Commentary with director Brett Ratner and writer Jeff Nathanson
• Featurettes: "Making Magic Out of Mire", "Fashion of Rush Hour 2", "Jackie Chan's Hong Kong Introduction", "Culture Clash: West Meets East", "Language Barrier", "Attaining International Stardom", "Kung Fu Choreography".
• Evolution of a Scene
• Visual Effects Deconstruction
• Deleted Scenes/Outtakes (with optional director/writer commentary)
• Theatrical Trailers
• Cast and Crew bios
• Fact Track
• DVD-rom with a script you can read alongside film
• as well as the usual plethora of language/subtitle options and chapter selection

This may not sound that impressive at first, but the DVD's Infinifilm option integrates almost every one of these elements into the film's presentation. Menus pop up onscreen, inviting you to watch short clips, snipped from the full featurettes listed above that deal directly with the scene.

In this example, the massage parlor fight is supplemented with material describing its construction. Play the clip and the disc returns you to the film at exactly the same point you were at before. Though the disc obviously needs a few seconds to gather up the selected data after you click an option, and a few more to get you back, it's nothing too jarring; and it helps that the clips are usually interesting and engage you more thoroughly with the film. Certainly the Infinifilm feature could become annoying for those watching the film for the first time, but it's not the default option on the disc. For those looking for a reason to watch it again, though, it's a perfect means to do so.

Outside of the Infinifilm, you can access all the supplemental material individually and in full. Though there's plenty of flatulent industry fluff, like "Fashion of Rush Hour 2" and "Making Magic Out of Mire", many of the other features are worth watching. Evolution of a Scene, essentially rehearsal footage of some of the more expensive/explosive scenes, is an interesting opportunity to see Jackie's method of choreography at work. I always appreciate the inclusion of deleted scenes, though in this case they were clearly deleted for a reason; same goes for the outtakes, really.

Brett Ratner and his screenwriter writer provide feature-length commentary and it's mostly banal stuff that gets regurgitated elsewhere on the disc. There's a bit too much gossip, and way too much Hollywood name-dropping, but on occasion they provide an insight or tow. One of the more intriguing special features is the Fact Track (above), an option that places a running stream of incidental notes on the lower part of the screen. These include useful biographical bits on Chan, Tucker, and the minor or incidental characters that surround them, as well as trivia regarding the scenery, shooting locations, and Snoopy's height relative to Tucker's racially-charged estimation of Chan's height. Like the Infinifilm option, though perhaps less exciting visually, Fact Track is yet another way to make a repeated viewing of the film seem novel. Strangely enough, it's possible to watch the film with the Fact Track, commentary, and Infinifilm features all running at the same time! It's a bit too much for the senses, I think, but it nonetheless proves that the disc is loaded not only with special features, but with a highly customizable engagement with them.

All things considered, the Rush Hour 2 Infinifilm DVD is one loaded with replay value. By my count, there's at least four-five different ways to watch the film: by itself, with Infinifilm, with commentary, with the fact track, and with some combination of the above options. This is in addition to the standalone full features accessible via the menu. It's too bad New Line gave up on the Infinifilm brand, because I wish all my DVDs/Blu-rays had this kind of depth.

Get the DVD on Amazon for $.01 right here (and make sure you follow the link to the Infinifilm product specifically, as there's another, stripped-down and feature-less version of the disc in circulation).

Classic Chan: Digging Around in the Archives

Seems a bit impractical, Jackie, but impressive nonetheless.

If you haven't had a look yet at our ongoing Classic Chan review series, we implore you to do so by checking out our reviews of Police Story and Police Story 2. Keep an eye out for more reviews in the coming weeks. In the meantime, though, you should know that there's a wealth of Jackie Chan content already awaiting you on Code Redd Net. Here's what you may be missing:

Reviews:

Jackie Chan's Stuntmaster
The Forbidden Kingdom
The Medallion
Rush Hour
Rush Hour 2
Rush Hour 3
Shanghai Knights
The Tuxedo
Twin Dragons

Code Redd Net Awards:

Best Jackie Chan Movie
Finest Fight

From our Finest Fights series (featuring spectacular embedded videos!):

Police Story
Jackie Chan's Thunderball
Jackie Chan's First Strike
Rumble in the [Vancouver] Bronx
Who Am I?

and, of course, there's always the golden Time Life CD box set Solid Gold Chan.

Danny should upgrade to a PS Vita. A higher resolution screen
would be much better for playing those games which Jackie always
forgets to give him.

Self-Styled: The Graphic Arts of Code Redd Net

Code Redd Net has never had a budget, or an office, or an art department. Everything we've done, Chicken Man and I, we've done ourselves, on our own time, with our own skills. Some of our attempts were, shall we say, a trifle amateurish. This has resulted in some rather humorous graphics floating around in our archives, from the (g)olden days of Geocities. I've tried to utilize these old files whenever possible on the blog, but there's some that, stubbornly, just don't have a place around here. Here's a collection of these dated, perhaps unused, images.

As you can see, for a time we liked to have banners at the top of each page. I remember when we had a Beats page, even if nobody else does. Also, we really dug Rush Hour 2. And I don't know about you, but my favorite is certainly the News banner. Mr. T, Bill O'Reilly, and is that Peekaboo Jones from TimeSplitters? Goodness, yes it is.

Ladies and Gentlemen, I give you the Chicken Man nameplate collection. Obviously, we tried out a few different styles over the years, but none, I wager, were as aesthetically unappealing as that second one.

Man, I miss my Tour Bus, like Chicken Man misses his Lair, I'm sure. Anyway, we had some interesting ideas for pages. Grillz existed primarily as a means to making fun of X-Play and other things we disliked at the time, and I'm only guessing when I tell you that I think Toasts was its opposite, though we never wrote any that I know of.

What you see here is are a few makeshift logos for games and movies that, at the time, had not been released yet. Incidentally, both Spy Hunter 2 and Rush Hour 3 were decidedly mediocre. You can see it in Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's faces below; Jackie looks off into the distance, horrified, while Chris seems concerned, but stoically determined to meet his fate, that being the end of his relevance in pop culture.

Oh, and thank the good Lord these redesigned logos were never used. I couldn't live with myself knowing that I changed our name from "Code Redd Net" to the infinitely grotesque "The Code."

Finally, here's some random pictures I found in the archives. Not sure what they are doing in there, but perhaps they'll help to cleanse the palate. A sorbet, if you will.

Rush Hour 4?

I knew the series was on the downslide, but damn.

"Found no rice, but only explosions."

Movie Review: Rush Hour 3 (2007)

Thankfully, Chris Tucker dialed down the high-pitched yelling (mostly) in Rush Hour 3. Sure, he still acts like an ill-disciplined and insecure child, he feels as if he has to hit on anything with two legs and long hair (and you should see his reaction when he discovers that the woman he is about to score with is only wearing a wig), but at least he's quieter this time around, even if he insists on being offensive. And you would never make the same complaints about Jackie Chan. In the first Rush Hour, Chan came to LA and worked in tandem with Tucker to rescue the kidnapped daughter of a Chinese diplomat. In 2, Tucker vacationed in Hong Kong with Chan and solved a mystery involving the Triads and counterfeit "superbills." Now, in this third installment, our duo head to Paris to protect a woman who has access to information which could finally dismantle the Triads. Somewhere along the way we are introduced to Chan's brother, Kenji; of course, he has to fight him in the climax of the film set (where else?) in the Eiffel Tower. If you think about these films in order, you will see a steady drop in the quality and quantity of Chan's famous stunt work. We forgive this in the second film because of our aforementioned affectation for it (due to outside factors, of course), but Chan fans have so little to look forward to in Rush Hour 3: his fight with his brother is fun, but nothing else really stands out, except for an inexplicable dramatic increase in the number of Chris Tucker fights, which are obviously of a lesser quality than Chan's work. So while this is a decent enough way to round out series, it is a bit of whimper. Jackie Chan devotees will be disappointed, but more casual action fans could find worse things to do.

Movie Review: Rush Hour (1998)

Rush Hour 2 may be our sentimental favorite, but the original certainly has its strengths. For one, Jackie Chan's stunt work is far superior here than in the sequel. Though neither film really lets Chan's prowess completely loose (that is saved for less mainstream kung-fu fare, like First Strike and Who Am I?, where the story is tailored more specifically to showcasing action first and story second) in Rush Hour he has considerably more exciting and plentiful action scenes. You might consider this film (and its sequels, as well as other films made in the same buddy-cop-action genre, such as Shanghai Noon and Knights) a sort of primer for the uninitiated, and from here you can tackle his more straightforward kung-fu films if interested; there you will find Chan unshackled by the demands of Hollywood and its emphasis on dialogue. But the humor is brisk and lively in this one, though Chris Tucker is far more annoying here than in subsequent entries, spending his half of the screen time either yelling or reinforcing outrageous stereotypes, and quite often both simultaneously. The contrast between the high-pitched Tucker and the stoic determination of Chan is effective enough, though, and overall the film is extremely efficient storytelling. Recommended for Chan fans, but you might want to see First Strike or Who Am I? immediately afterwords if you want to really see what all the fuss is about.