What? We're making another movie?
Do you feel that there has been a gaping hole in your movie life where mismatched budy comedies used to be? Do you year for the days of zany east meets west crime fighting high jinks? Then you will surely be excited to hear that “Rush Hour 4″ is in progress.
In an interview with CraveOnline, “Rush Hour” producer Arthur Sarkissian said:
“I am working on Rush Hour 4right now with Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan. 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.”
Something new? Sarkissian threw out ideas:
“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.”
No, Octavia Spencer did not play Chris’s cousin in any of the other movies. Sarkissian just came up with that one out of nowhere.
Jackie Chan has been busy since “Rush Hour 3,” but until recently, Tucker had preacticallly dropped off the face of the earth. He’ll be seen with Bradley Cooper in “The Silver Linings Playbook” and now, I guess, “Rush Hour 4.”
As for director Brett Ratner, who did the previous three films, Sarkissian said, “t. “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.” Wow, he really hated “Rush Hour 3.”
I guess the question always is whether a franchise has worn itself out or if a concept has been taken as far as it can be taken. Sometimes an idea can be revitalized, though, as Sarkissian notes, referencing “Fast Five.”
“One of the things that surprised me and actually excited me was how they did Fast Five. They kept the characters, they took them and they put them in a whole different world. They put them in the world of a heist movie and it worked. I think that was brilliant what they did because if you’re not careful, what happens is you just keep repeating yourself. There’s not much you can do. You’ve got to be very careful but that’s where creativity and energy and good thought and a little bit of hard work comes to try and give them something that’s in that world but a little different.”
So yeah, all the intentions are good, but now we’ll see if it a) actually happens and b) if it’s worth the trouble…
