Movies that Dictators Love
by Annalee Newitz
Donald Trump has proposed a lot of weird initiatives in his second term, but his revival of the Rush Hour movie franchise might be the weirdest. A few weeks ago, Paramount greenlit Rush Hour 4 at Trump’s request.
The buddy cop series began in 1998 with Rush Hour, starring Chris Tucker as Detective Carter of the LAPD and Jackie Chan in his first major American role as Chief Inspector Lee of the Hong Kong Police Force. It’s a Clinton-era comedy of multiculturalism where the protagonists are people of color and the final bosses are white oligarchs. In Rush Hour 2, Carter explains to Lee that “every big crime has a rich white man behind it, waiting to take his cut.” The series ended with Rush Hour 3 in 2007.
Why the hell would an avowedly white supremacist politician like Trump want to exhume this franchise? Is it the movies’ casual sexism and boob-honking slapstick moments? The embrace of racial stereotypes, in a very 1990s “I’m not racist, I make fun of everyone” move? Or the forced rehabilitation of director Brett Ratner, whose career tanked in spectacular fashion in 2017 after six women accused him of sexually assaulting and harassing them. Ratner settled out of court and Warner Bros. severed all ties with him, cancelling a nearly half-billion dollar co-financing deal with Ratner’s company RatPac. You can understand why this is a guy whom Trump might want to glaze. After all, he too was cancelled by the woke mob of women who don’t like their pussies grabbed.
But after watching the Rush Hour series, I wasn’t convinced that any of these theories could fully explain its allure for Trump. There was something else going on.
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