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As comic police partners in fight-filled action movies, Chan and Tucker fit together like Laurel & Hardy, Abbott & Costello, Murphy & Nolte, Gibson & Glover.
This unusual and obvious positive interaction is why the Hong Kong superstar Chan finally made his big Hollywood breakthrough in Rush Hour, in which he first partnered with the American comic Tucker.
It is also why Rush Hour 2 is fighting its way into a theatre near you this Friday, with Chan and Tucker sharing first billing in unique ways.
"They hate each other," teases Rush Hour director Brett Ratner, who also helmed the sequel, which he denies is actually a sequel in the conventional way.
"It's not like a sequel," Ratner says. "It's like family. We had so much fun."
And, no, Chan and Tucker do not hate each other.
Rush Hour 2 is, however, a bona-fide sequel and it exists because the original 1998 movie kicked major butt at the North American box office. It also did well everywhere else in the world except Asia, because it was too American for Chan fans.
Oddly, neither Ratner, Chan nor Tucker thinks too highly of the original flick themselves. They prefer the new sequel.
"Definitely, I like it better than the first one," Chan says. But making the tightly budgeted Rush Hour original was crucial to getting it right this time.
"I can't complain about the other one," Ratner says, "because if the other one didn't exist, I could never have created this one. You could never have had a budget like this with a black and an Asian star -- never. Not before Rush Hour."
That Hollywood truth is, Ratner says, "unfortunate," but things are flexible in Hollywood because money talks.
"Rush Hour has helped to change the mindset of Hollywood -- that you don't have to be a white Anglo-Saxon American (such as) Tom Hanks or Tom Cruise to have a blockbuster, that you can be of any ethnic origin. You just have to make a good movie."
For his part, Tucker tells The Sun he is not offended knowing that Hollywood would never commit a large budget to a Chan-Tucker movie unless they scored a hit first.
"I don't think it's racism," he says. "It's just business. It's how the business works."
That's where the intangible thing about casting, about chemistry, comes in, Ratner says.
"It's one thing," he says of the chance success of teaming Chan & Tucker. "It's only one thing. It's chemistry.
"And chemistry is something you can't explain. It either is or it isn't. They have it. They're just opposites. They're from two totally different worlds, two totally different cultures. The fact that they don't understand each other makes it interesting."
Ratner means that literally. The Hong Kong-born Chan, who was apprenticed to the Peking Opera starting at age six for years of music, dance and martial-arts training, is still struggling with his English. The comic Tucker, meanwhile, has his own unique version of the language, especially when he is performing. Neither man could understand the other on set during the filming of the original Rush Hour.
"Before the first one," Chan says, "I don't really know him. I'm hiding from him. When he comes to talk to me, I'm just hiding because I don't know what he's saying. I have to respond but my English is not good enough. I hide in my motor home. Only slowly, slowly, we got to know each other."
The friendship blossomed during the Rush Hour promotional tour in Japan, Hong Kong and Korea, Chan says. "We stay together. We ate together. We became good friends."
It was easier to shoot Rush
Hour 2. "We're buddies," Chan says.
He claims, more as a joke than anything, that he still doesn't have a clue what Tucker is talking about half the time, but figures he now gets the gist of the conversation.
"We had interpreters," Tucker says with a chuckle. "But Jackie understands what he wants to understand. When we start talking about money -- ohhhhh!"
Chan reportedly earned a
US$15-million salary plus a percentage of the grosses for Rush Hour 2.
That healthy payday is easy to understand. Chan is convinced that, because it has more traditional comic action scenes, Rush Hour 2 will do better in Asia -- and particularly in his stronghold of Hong Kong -- than the original Rush Hour did (although still not as well as his original Hong Kong productions). Rush Hour, he says, was what he calls a "very typical American film, very local."
The reaction in Asia was, he says: "Ha! Ho!" The reaction in North America was: "HA! HA! HA! and everybody clap."
It was a watershed in Chan's career plan.
"From that time on, I knew I had to make two kinds of films. One film for American market, one film for my own market. In my own market, they have been watching Jackie Chan films for so many years.
"In America, I'm a new action star. But no, I'm not new, I'm old, an old action star. They just don't know me."
Chan -- who turned 47 in April yet is still powerfully built and fit enough to continue to do all his own stunts and break more bones in his body on each shoot -- literally invented the comedy martial-arts genre in 1980 with his directorial effort The Young Master.
He sussed out the fact that he could never really replace the legendary Bruce Lee -- with whom he had worked as an actor and stunt director -- and that he had to carve out his own niche in the popular Hong Kong film industry.
Combining his physicality with the slapstick humour he learned from watching the silent films of Buster Keaton and Harold Lloyd, Chan made movie history. Yet the process of mainstream acceptance in North America was painfully slow.
And, yes, that is important to the ambitious Chan. "My own audience, not enough," he says. Chan also wants to expand his repertoire to include more dramatic and less physical roles, such as in the DreamWorks production Tuxedo, which he will start filming in Toronto in September.
Chan is incredibly busy. He is currently filming Highbinders, a Hong Kong action movie, in London, England. Shooting will be suspended when he comes to Toronto, and then pick up again during the Christmas break from Tuxedo. Early next year he will film a sequel to Shanghai Noon called Shanghai Night. A future project in which he will co-star with his fellow Asian superstar Jet Li was announced this week. Chan doesn't know how to say no to a movie he wants to do.
"I don't know," he says with a shrug about why he works non-stop. "Friendship, promises. Highbinders is by a friend of mine and he wanted to get in the film business. I look at my schedule. No time to rest. I'm happy, I'm happy. But I wouldn't mind having a vacation.
"But making a movie for me is a vacation. I'd rather be making a film than doing a promotion."
He says he is exhausted after a round of interviews, movie premieres and appearances on the TV talk-show circuit.
"That drives you crazy. I'd rather stay on the set and then, today, the only thing I know is the movie. More easy, more relaxing."
Hold that Tiger
Don't assume Asian superstar Jackie Chan is all agog at the phenomenal artistic and box-office success of Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon, the most successful Asian-made movie in history.
He's not that impressed.
"It is a surprise for me," he says of the box-office receipts. "The same that it was a surprise for me on Rush Hour."
As for the Ang Lee movie, "We've been making this kind of movie for more than 30 years. Right now, if you come to Hong Kong, on cable TV, on pay TV, everything is the same thing."
Maybe it's sour grapes. Chan talked to the Taiwanese-American Lee about starring in Crouching Tiger, as did Jet Li, before Chow Yun Fat got the co-starring role.
In Chan's words, the conversation went like this: "Ang Lee said, 'No, this is not your film. People won't like it because there's flying around!' "
Chan is known for his grounded fight scenes and use of unusual props, such as the potted plants and long bamboo poles he uses in Rush Hour 2. The fight scenes in Crouching Tiger were more surreal and included extensive wire work.
"I don't like these kinds of things," Chan says of Crouching Tiger. "I do want Ang Lee to make a movie with me. It is a drama movie, totally drama."