‘Rush Hour' Barely Makes it to Work

By any stretch of the imagination, “Rush Hour”—yes, the remake of the moderately successful 1998 film “Rush Hour” (with Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker, remember them?)—is mediocre television. It is thinly plotted. Its characters are barely sketches of stereotypes. Every aspect of the show is derivative to a fault. If “Lethal Weapon” and “Once Upon A Time in China” had an underperforming baby, which then had a child with a mediocre CBS police procedural, you would have “Rush Hour.” But somewhere along the way, in an affront to common sense, “Rush Hour” is vaguely enjoyable and, oddly, culturally important.

“Rush Hour” is, in short, a combination between a culture clash and buddy-cop procedural. It tries on a few hats—comedy fits moderately well. Kung fu fits very well. Plot, on the other hand, runs a bit small: Chinese gangsters steal rare artifacts recently shipped to Los Angeles. After a series of benign events, Hong Kong detective Yan Naing Lee is brought to America to investigate the robbery. Soon he is paired with the generically named black detective James Carter. Various inconsequential things happen for 60 minutes. However, CBS police procedurals are not necessarily interesting (or for that matter, widely watched) because of their well-developed and interesting plots. Compelling characters form the backbone of these shows; only an investment in the happiness of these characters keeps inherently uninteresting narratives from actually being uninteresting. “Rush Hour” has successfully built this backbone—while unfortunately omitting an emphasis on making this episode’s plot passable.

Replacing Jackie Chan and Justin Tucker from the original Rush Hour are Jon Foo, known for notable roles in the 2010 film “Universal Soldier: Regeneration” as “UniSol 2” and “Olympus Has Fallen” as “Stunt Performer,” and Justin Hires, whose most notable work came in Key and Peele, where he reprised his role of “Bystander #1” and “Friend.” Foo plays Detective Lee, written as stoic and unflinchingly rule-abiding, with the soul of a bureaucrat inside the shell of a martial arts master. However, Foo—despite his complete lack of serious television or film experience—manages to elevate Detective Lee past the show writers’ bleak stereotypes and into half of the stable and sympathetic core of “Rush Hour.” It is not that Foo is a particularly skilled actor; he often delivers lines woodenly, looks disinterested in many scenes, and unsuccessfully toes the line between his natural boyish charm and his stoic characterization. Yet his character—despite his own failures as an actor and the obtuse characterization his writers have saddled him with—is simply likable because, by sheer force of will, Foo makes us like Detective Lee.

Opposite Foo is Hires, playing Detective James Carter—a similarly thinly written character who manages to transcend the writers’ simplistic conception of him. What makes Hires’ performance important, however, is the context within which he is acting. Currently, police procedurals (save LL Cool J as James Todd Smith on “NCIS Los Angeles”) feature a dearth of likable black men. One of the most watched shows currently airing featuring a predominately black cast, “Empire,” is essentially a dressed up hip-hop soap opera. As with all soap operas, it highlights the misbehaviors of all its characters. “Rush Hour,” while a flawed show, is presenting an alternative and important vision of blackness. It is presenting a character who is likable and can actually be admired, a character who just so happens to be black.

No one was clamoring for the television adaption of “Rush Hour”; so the writers, very cleverly, have not attempted to replicate the movie on television. Instead, they have mined specific themes of the film that are a welcome break from the repetitiveness of police procedurals. Kung fu and comedy stand out from CBS’s other vanilla offerings. And now, more than ever, the cultural dichotomy explored in the film is particularly important to examine on television today. What more could be asked from CBS’s TV machine?