‘Too Much Money Is No Good.' Jackie Chan Gets Real About Why Rush Hour 3 Stunk And What's Going On With A Fourth Movie

Yahoo

04-06-2025

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One of the most important lessons in entertainment is something that's been true long before the 2025 movie schedule started, and will continue to be valid long after it's finished. It's practically a commandment that 'not all sequels are created equal,' especially when they're prompted out of a sleeper hit like one of Jackie Chan's best movies, 1998's Rush Hour. However, even with Mr. Chan's polite rejection of the third entry in the canon, the action-comedy superstar is still ready for a fourth rush!
On hand to promote his role in Karate Kid: Legends, Jackie Chan's BuzzFeed 'Puppy Interview' saw him being asked to rank the Rush Hour movies he made with Chris Tucker. Through those rankings was this running thread of thought that saw Chan rightfully putting Rush Hour 3 at the bottom:
The first one [had] little money, little time. We shot [it] like 'Go, go, go!' The second one [had] a lot of money, a lot of time. The third one? Too much money! Too much time! Too much money is no good.
Reading that assessment of the series as a whole makes a lot of sense. Coming from the scrappy beginnings that saw director Brett Ratner hand in an unexpected blockbuster in 1998, Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker's shtick was at its peak when it was more on the fly.
That seems to be a truth that was present since day one, as even our own Rush Hour 3 review called the film out for squandering a promising first act. Perhaps such reactions, as well as Chan's own kind but firm feedback on the 2007 entry, have him ready to go one more round.
Another Rush Hour question came up in an interview with Karate Kid: Legends' action legend on the red carpet for the premiere of that very movie. ScreenRant caught up with Jackie Chan and asked him if there was actually any progress to report on a Rush Hour 4. That yielded this update, set to inspire some mixed feelings:
I don't know. Ask the director, ask the studio, ask the writer. Hurry up! Otherwise, Chris Tucker and me [will be] 100 years old. We'll be old men doing Rush Hour.
It's kind of hard to believe that Rush Hour 4 hasn't found some sort of footing, especially with Tucker himself hyping the project in the recent past. That viewpoint only intensified after Chan indicated that a second sequel to Shanghai Noon, titled Shanghai Dawn, actually has a script in play.
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With that revelation coming from the same interview, it's really crazy that both this Owen Wilson co-starring romp and Chan's 2010 reboot of The Karate Kid (which is currently streamable with a Prime Video subscription) found continuations before one of his biggest hits ever did. Admittedly, the latter concept probably came in part from the meteoric success of Cobra Kai, but the point still stands.
Even though it's been almost 20 years since Rush Hour 3 did its thing in theaters, so long as Rush Hour 4 has the right script and the proper hustle is involved, this could be what Jackie Chan and his fans needed to see. For now, though, you can see the action star in Karate Kid: Legends, which opens in theaters this weekend.