Jackie Chan is opening a new film on domestic shores again, starring as Mr. Han in the newest entry of The Karate Kid series — Karate Kid: Legends. Chan’s journey through American cinema hasn’t seemingly been able to match the quality of his Hong Kong output, but the international star does have a couple of popular franchises with western audiences after the success of the Rush Hour and Shanghai movies. After importing his past hits, Chan starred in Rush Hour with Chris Tucker, which became a big moneymaker for New Line Cinema, and two sequels would follow.
While doing press for Karate Kid: Legends, Chan was invited to rank the Rush Hour films in a BuzzFeed video interview. According to Variety, the martial arts star was hesitant at first, but decided to rank them in a different manner, which saw Rush Hour 3 facing some criticism from the man himself. When Chan was asked to rank the films, he responded,
I don’t know. You know what, the first one: little money, little time. We shot it like, ‘Go, go, go, go!’ The second one: a lot of money, a lot of time. The third one: too much money, too much time. Too much money is no good.”
Rush Hour 3 wasn’t received as well as the other two, as it earned the least amount of the trilogy at the box office with $140 million after the second film’s massive success at $226 million. The third film was also panned critically and currently sports the lowest audience scores out of the franchise on both Rotten Tomatoes and Letterboxd. Despite the poor reception, Chan and Tucker have teased that a fourth film has been in the works for a number of years.
Meanwhile, Chan can be seen as Mr. Han in Karate Kid: Legends. Director Jonathan Entwistle has conveyed that he wanted the movie to have the feel of an early Jackie Chan film, saying, “Ben was fully training every day with the Chinese stunt team. He knew that I wanted the martial arts in the movie to feel like an early Jackie Chan film, and that’s something we tried really hard to do. We used a lot of classic Hong Kong wire-work.“
