3) Rush Hour
You can’t talk about 90s unlikely buddy cop comedies without paying respect to Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker in Rush Hour. Not only did it skyrocket Chan and Tucker to levels of movie fame they had not enjoyed before or since, it made a name for director and documented douchebag Brett Ratner, who also found the peak of his directorial stardom in 1998. One of the advantages of a movie that sticks to a specific genre is that it gets to participate in conversation with similar movies that have come before it, which makes its departures stand out as conscious decisions to diverge from the perceived standard, and these differences tend to be the greatest pleasures of the genre film experience.
In Rush Hour, a couple of key generic tropes are played with in a way that affects the entire tone of the movie, allowing it to feel fresh in the context of the buddy cop genre, and this is all really accomplished simply by the casting and chemistry of the two leads. The first alteration is makes is in the inclusion of Jackie Chan in the typical American buddy cop story of “partners from two different worlds” that was popular in the 80s. With Chan’s involvement, the genre can shift back and forth between comedy, which Chan always seems to be surprisingly good at, and martial arts, which the genre was not as good at, or at least not as credible.
It also plays off the dynamic of the one partner who’s a loudmouth and the other who’s strong and silent, but in this case, there’s a bit of a literal language barrier between the two, which accentuates some of the comedic miscommunications between the two. Ultimately though, what makes this work is the feeling that Chan and Tucker are genuinely enjoying their time together, making their friendship and partnership believable and entertaining. You have to like them. And apparently, audiences liked them enough to support two more movies featuring Lee and Carter.
