Shit, Actually

by Lindy West

  Two dumbass cops try to arrest them, but Chris Penn shoots both of them and drives off. Chris Tucker, who is actually an undercover cop (GOOD JOB), shoots the car and the C-4 blows up. Then he’s like, “Yeah!” and does a dance. While I appreciate the dance, this situation does not warrant it!

  Mr. Han, now settled down in the Chinese consulate in LA (which is…Downton Abbey?), promises Soo Yung that he will pick her up from school and sends her off with a chauffeur and a bodyguard. On the way, Soo Yung is singing along to Mariah Carey, having the fricking time of her life in the back seat, and for some reason the driver and the guard are rolling their eyes and barfing in their own mouths, and I’m not saying I’m glad that five seconds later they get murdered by Ken Leung, but I think we can all agree that their hands aren’t exactly clean!!!!!

  Soo Yung almost gets away, pulverizing the kidnappers’ domes with her wicked kicking just like Jackie Chan taught her, but she gets grabbed right at the end. The FBI begins an investigation, but Mr. Han only wants one man on the case: JACKIE CHAN. (Same, TBQH! In real life for all real crimes!)

  Over at the police station, Chris Tucker is in big trouble for doing a terrible job on the C-4 sting operation and getting the two dumbass cops shot for no reason. His colleague from the bomb squad, Johnson (Elizabeth Peña, RIP), lectures him about how he wouldn’t fuck up so hard if he had a partner. “I work alone,” he says. “I don’t want no partner, I don’t need no partner.” Dramatic irony! I think!1 Then he sexually harasses her for eight to nine minutes.

  The FBI is absolutely incandescently enraged, to a truly baffling degree, about Mr. Han bringing Jackie Chan, an esteemed Hong Kong police detective, to LA to help on his daughter’s kidnapping case, which involves a Chinese crime syndicate. Sounds like maybe he could be helpful, but I’m just a cashier with an English degree!

  They’re so mad Jackie Chan is coming, they decide that as punishment they’re going to team him up with the most annoying guy at the LAPD, Chris Tucker. Just normal adult police behavior and excellent mystery-solving when the child of an important diplomat is in mortal danger!

  (I am very smitten with the fact that Chris Tucker was one of the highest-paid movie stars in the world, and then one day he was just like, “Sorry, I only like one thing now, and it’s church.” And now all he does is go to church. His only scandal is that he once got a speeding ticket because he was late for church! And he had a $2.5 million tax lien, probably because he gave too much money to church, or he went to church so hard he forgot to pay his taxes. Either way, he’s perfect.)

  Chris Tucker’s captain tells him he has a very special classified assignment with the FBI, and at first he’s jazzed, but then he finds out it’s just “babysitting” Jackie Chan. “What the hell am I supposed to do with him, take him to the zoo?” <—another movie I would watch!

  I should mention that in this movie there is a LOT of Chris Tucker making fun of Jackie Chan for not speaking English perfectly—most famously, “DO YOU UNDERSTAND THE WORDS THAT ARE COMING OUT OF MY MOUTH?”—and the only redeeming thing I can say about that is that it didn’t happen as much as I remembered?

  Chris Tucker takes Jackie Chan to Mann’s Chinese Theater on Hollywood Boulevard and is like, “Look familiar? Just like home, ain’t it!?!?” which…SIR.

  Jackie Chan escapes on a sightseeing bus, and Chris Tucker chases him all around the town. The FBI will not even let Jackie Chan in to say hi to Mr. Han, and for some reason he does not have his cell phone number? Like, I didn’t have a cell phone in 1998, but they existed! This guy is the Chinese consul! He lives in a castle!

  Since they’re both being shut out by the feds, Tucker and Chan decide to try to solve the case themselves by using the buddy cop’s most potent tool: bickering (q.v., Bad Boys II). And for all of its moments that didn’t age well, there’s just no denying that Chris Tucker is a big bright shining star and one of the most naturally funny and watchable human beings to ever live and Jackie Chan is a narcotically lovable model of masculine warmth, and some things are just greater than the sum of their parts on a level that is magic!

  Jackie Chan manages to get inside the consulate and tell Mr. Han that word on the street is that “there’s a badass dude in town from Hong Kong” who’s buying up all the guns and bombs. Just then, the kidnapper calls! And, PRAISE JESUS for the comedy, Chris Tucker answers! The kidnapper demands $50 million for the return of Soo Yung. They trace the call to a (pre-revitalization) building in downtown LA, a rotting industrial space that’s actually a Sweetgreens now!

  Once they get down there, Jackie Chan has a bad feeling. He tells the FBI, “You must pull your men back!” and they’re like, “GET THIS CLOWN OUT OF HERE!” I truly do not understand the FBI’s animosity toward Jackie Chan, who has been nothing but cordial and professional this whole time, but apparently it would kill them to take him seriously for even one single second. So the building explodes, killing the entire FBI.

  Jackie Chan runs into Ken Leung on the street after the explosion and recognizes him from Juntao’s crime crew! Ken Leung looks terrified to see Jackie Chan right there in Los Angeles because Jackie Chan is famously the Dumbledore to Ken Leung’s Lord Voldemort—the only wizard Ken Leung was ever afraid of! He thought he was dealing with Cornelius Fudge over here. Jackie Chan chases Ken Leung down a dank, slimy alley (that alley is actually also a Sweetgreens now!) and up into a haunted theater that is actually Timothée Chalamet’s loft now! Ken Leung gets away, but he drops a mysterious device. A clue!

  They go to see Johnson and ask if she knows what this thingy is, and at first she’s like, “Oh, now you want to work with me? Hell no!” Which I’m sympathetic to because there is only ONE woman in Rush Hour, and all she does is be a bitch and get hit on, but SORRY, YOU DO HAVE TO DO THE POLICE JOB FOR WHICH YOU ARE PAID. If you have a problem you should go to HR, Johnson! She tells them it’s some kind of remote control and they leave.

  Then they go visit Chris Penn in jail (he survived the car explosion), and he tells them that the mysterious guy buying up explosives is named Juntao, and they can find him at the Foo Chow restaurant in Chinatown. Then there’s a very long scene where Chris Tucker teaches Jackie Chan to dance to “War, What Is It Good For?” and I’m not entirely sure what’s going on or how that was even written into the script, but I don’t mind! Then Jackie Chan buys them a snack from a Chinese food stall and says it’s “eel and camel’s hump,” and it is blowing my mind that “Chinese people eat cra-a-a-a-a-zy stuff!” was a socially acceptable punch line until I was a full adult! That’s wild! The only upside to this xenophobic vignette is that Chris Tucker thinks the eel and camel’s hump is really good, which is probably true!

  Chris Tucker gives Jackie Chan his LAPD ID and tells him to pretend to be LAPD if anything goes sideways in the Foo Chow restaurant. Jackie Chan looks at the ID with Chris Tucker’s picture on it and says, “This won’t work—I’m not 6′1″!” And that’s just a gorgeously structured classic joke.

  It is absolutely unclear what the fuck their plan is going into this restaurant, but what happens is that Chris Tucker gets a table and asks for camel’s hump, then tells the waitress he wants to see Mr. Juntao. She goes upstairs and we see…Mr. Juntao is Tom Wilkinson!!!!! ADOYEEEEEEEEEE.

  Chris Tucker gets caught and Jackie Chan has to rescue him and they end up blowing up the restaurant, which a family of immigrants probably poured their lifeblood into for many years. They get in huge trouble with the FBI because they fucked up the ransom drop, and Mr. Han puts Jackie on a punishment plane back to Hong Kong. Now the ransom is increased to $70 million!

  Undeterred, Chris Tucker gets Jackie Chan off the plane by pretending to be an airplane mechanic. (Again, you could just…call a person? Or go into the airport and talk to him at the gate? This is pre-9/11! You don’t need to be sneaking on to tarmacs potentially causing mayhem and death!)

  Tom Wilkinson goes to visit his “friend” Mr. Han—what a dick!—and advises him to just pay the ransom. Now
the drop is going to take place at a big party for the Chinese art Jackie Chan rescued at the beginning of the movie. Mr. Han has to be the emcee for some reason even though his DAUGHTER IS CURRENTLY KIDNAPPED, and if that ever happens to me and I don’t get at least one day off I’m talking to HR for sure!!!

  Chris Tucker causes a scene at the gala and forces Tom Wilkinson to reveal himself as Juntao. Juntao tells Mr. Han that Soo Yung is in a van outside with C-4 strapped to her, so Chris Tucker goes and gets her and starts screaming at Tom Wilkinson to use the remote control to blow her up. Go ahead! Blow up this little kid! “Come on! Push the button!” Tom Wilkinson wavers. YES. YES, CHRIS TUCKER. FORCE THE BLOODTHIRSTY RICH TO PUT A HUMAN FACE ON THEIR VIOLENCE.

  Everybody loves “never touch a Black man’s radio” the best, but right here Tom Wilkinson runs away and Chris Tucker yells, “Look at your little punk British ass!” and I can feel it in my pelvic floor. Johnson defuses the bomb. Jackie Chan runs around trying to beat up all the guys AND save all the art, which is a 10/10 formula.

  Juntao is getting away with the money suitcase! He’s climbing and climbing the scaffolding up to the roof so he can meet his helicopter and fly away. But he doesn’t understand that Jackie Chan is the fastest ladder-climber in Hong Kong! They grapple on a catwalk, and Tom Wilkinson falls to his death. Then Jackie Chan falls too, but Chris Tucker saves him. NOW THEY ARE TRUE BEST FRIENDS AND THEY GO ON A BEACH VACATION TOGETHER TO HONG KONG.

  Rush Hour is a flawed thing, a creature of 1998, and it is not my jurisdiction to dismiss its faults. But complicated love is still love.

  RATING: 8/10 DVDs of The Fugitive.

  Footnotes

  1 Wow, this just sent me plummeting down an existential spiral about how if I have one expertise it’s literature and I can’t even remember if Chris Tucker announcing he will never have a partner in a buddy cop movie counts as dramatic irony and my English degree means literally nothing and is merely a class signifier so that a certain kind of person will feel comfortable hiring me for a certain kind of job and wow wow wow I think college might be fake and toxic!

  All the Kissing in the World Could Not Save It

  When Garden State came out I was a twenty-two-year-old naïf who knew little of “critical thinking” or “not liking a movie just because it has kissing in it” or “maybe straight middle-class white guys have gotten to tell their stories enough times and there are many, many other stories that have never been told and seeking and amplifying those stories, thereby humanizing those underserved communities to otherwise incurious privileged audiences, is an ethical imperative for those who believe, as you claim to, in ending oppression,” so I think my review went something like, “ADEQUATE!!!!! MORE KISSING NEXT TIME!!!”

  As I learned in my exploratory rewatch, Garden State is not adequate. It is a doodoo movie, and it stinks like doodoo. All the kissing in the world could not save it. Also, I just noticed for the first time that Zach Braff has a perfectly round mouth like a lamprey, which makes the kissing parts kind of weird, not that there’s anything wrong with lampreys. #RoundMouthPositive

  So, Zach Braff is on a crashing plane, and everyone is freakin’, but not Zach Braff because Zach Braff cares naught for plane crashes! Due to this modern world, Zach Braff eats many pills per day to destroy his emotions, even the emotion that makes you care about dying in a plane crash, which psychiatrists agree is a pretty big one.

  Turns out, though, it was only a dream, and Zach Braff wakes up safe and sound (IF THE HOLLOW MUNDANITY OF HUMAN EXISTENCE CAN REALLY BE CALLED “SAFE AND SOUND”) in his apartment, which is white and blank and full of pills just like his emotion-hole. Then his dad calls and is like, “Yo, your mom died, you should probably come to New Jersey now.”

  And Zach Braff is like:

  :-|

  Except really it’s more like:

  :-o

  Because #lamprey.

  Before he can go to New Jersey, though, he has to go to his job at the Vietnamese restaurant, where today’s special is MALAISE,1 and his boss threatens to give his job to Todd Swanson from Duluth, Minnesota, who apparently is some sort of internationally renowned Vietnamese-food-serving wunderkind. Man, fuck you, Todd Swanson.

  So, he flies to New Jersey and goes to his mom’s funeral, which is fine, and reconnects with his high school friend Peter Sarsgaard, who, for the record, is foine. Some lady makes him a shirt out of wallpaper, and he’s a real dick about it.

  Then his dad, Bilbo Baggins, is like, “Son. Come over here; I need to withhold some emotions from you.” And ZB is like, “Hey, Dad, I’m having these headaches, am I dying?” and Bilbo is like, “Who do I look like—Radagast the Brown!??!?!?!” and ZB is like, “Kind of, TBH.”

  He goes to a party with Sarsgaard and this terrible Velcro magnate, and everyone is like, “You’re some big movie star now!” They do not know it, but really he is small. Just a small movie star in a white apartment full of medicine cabinets. Truly the greatest American tragedy.

  The Velcro magnate talks about how he got too rich selling his patent for “silent Velcro” (WHAT NEED DOES THAT FILL2), and now he’s terribly, terribly, terribly bored and alone with only his mansion, his friends, his hot babes, and his anything-he-wants-in-the-universe, and I’m pretty sure we’re supposed to knit our brows and nod and feel like we learned something profound about the world because IT’S SO HARD BEING A RICH WHITE MAN SWIMMING IN VELCRO MONEY. Except it’s not. It is objectively easier than being most other things that a person can be. It is definitely easier to be bored, empty, depressed, and rich than to be bored, empty, depressed, and poor! If you’re so fucking bored, invent something else. God.

  Meanwhile, ZB gets grinded on by a hottie and feels nothing. Too basic.

  He wakes up at Sarsgaard’s house and Jim Parsons is there dressed as a knight, which is moderately interesting for thirty seconds, and then everyone sits around petting dead cats for three to four hours.

  Suddenly, Braff remembers about his headache appointment with Radagast! Oh no! He’s late! He throws the dead cat aside and it miraculously reanimates, validating my long-held and widely ridiculed theory that Zach Braff’s crotch is a pet sematary.

  He rushes over to the clinic, where he immediately gets humped by the world’s most incompetent seeing-eye dog and cannot figure out how to get its red penis off him. Just an idea I’m workshopping—how about: “HEY, LADY, GET YOUR DOG OFF ME.”

  Enter Natalie Portman.

  Natalie Portman’s character claims to be a human being but is actually a genie that exists entirely within the mind of Zach Braff’s dreaming penis. Much has already been written about this, so I will not rehash it in great detail. She tap-dances. She lies. She emcees somber hamster funerals. She introduces strangers to her blankie. She figure-skates in a crushed-velvet alligator costume. She wears an epilepsy helmet just long enough to facilitate a wise and bittersweet moment and then never wears it again. She walks over to her record player and opens the lid but doesn’t put a record on just to make sure you know she has one.

  Here are some words that Zach Braff wrote down for Natalie Portman to say throughout the course of the movie:

  “My hair’s blowin’ in the wind.”

  “Can we have code names?”

  “You know what I do when I feel completely unoriginal? [WORST THING EVER HAPPENS] I make a noise, or do something that no one has ever done before. Then I can feel unique again, even if it’s only for a second.”

  “If you can’t laugh at yourself, life’s going to seem a whole lot longer than you’d like.”

  “I’m weird, man.”

  Oh, are you? Tell me more.

  They hang out in the graveyard while Peter Sarsgaard robs graves and then ZB and NP watch a French bulldog masturbate. At this point, the accumulated quirkiness has blocked out the sun and the crops have failed. All’s lost, all’s lost.

  Peter Sarsgaard says he has a surprise for Zach Braff, but first they have to go watch porno in a closet with Me
thod Man (<———MAKE THIS YOUR ENTIRE MOVIE NEXT TIME). When ZB begins fretting about dirty porno getting all over NP’s delicate sensibilities, she retorts, “I’m not innocent.” And he goes, “Yes you ARE, and that’s what I like about you.”

  OH, FUCK OFF, MAN.

  Sarsgaard leads them to this quarry in Newark, which is a metaphor for GUUUUUHHHHHHHHHHHHHH, where they find a bloviating Pilates instructor who lives in an old boat.

  Ugh, you live in an old boat in the bottom of a quarry in Newark? How pedestrian. MY junkyard guru lives in an old tampon box in the bottom of a witch’s well in San Antonio.

  He gives Sarsgaard a package and then, famously, everyone screams into the abyss to represent the battle against overmedicated twenty-first-century millennial ennui, and it is so fucking stupid that now I AM an abyss. Then ZB sort of tenderly lips NP’s face like a gorilla investigating a pair of bifocals.

  Sarsgaard finally gives Braff his secret present, which is his dead mom’s “favorite necklace,” and is like PS, YOU’RE WELCOME, I ROBBED YOUR MOM’S GRAVE FOR YOUR BIRTHDAY. I DUG UP HER COFFIN AND UNBUTTONED HER BLOUSE AND LIFTED HER CORPSIFIED HEAD AND TENDERLY UNDID THE CLASP AND STOLE THIS NECKLACE AND NOW I’M GIVING IT TO YOU. SORRY ABOUT THE SMELL. AND THE CURSE.

  And Braff is, like, jazzed about it. Like that was a real solid thing to do.

  He and Portman go celebrate by sitting in the dry bathtub where his mom died, and he goes, “When I’m with you, I feel so safe. Like I’m home.”

  OH, THANK GOODNESS. BY THE WAY, SHE HAS LITERALLY NOT ONCE SAID HOW SHE FEELS FOR THIS ENTIRE MOVIE.

  Then he goes to the airport and then he changes his mind and comes back from the airport because he realizes that without his presence she would simply wink out of existence because she is a fucking shell of a person, a marionette, an agency-free boner-golem.