A full six years after Rush Hour 2, cop buddies Lee (Chan) and Carter (Tucker) return to fight another batch of triads. The Chinese ambassador is shot during diplomacy meetings held by the head of council (played by an almost unconscious Max von Sydow). The ambassador survives, but the attacks continue until Lee and Carter trace the triads back to Paris, where they discover Lee’s brother Kenji (Sanada) is behind a plot to find the names of an ancient underworld pact hidden somewhere on the streets of France.

Chan walks through this unnecessary sequel with his eyes closed, shifting to autopilot for fight scenes involving a kinky Chinese dominatrix and a high-wire duel on the Eiffel Tower. Tucker, the comedian, is awarded ample verbal space at the expense of his own audience. Nobody is spared from the film’s ignorant script. The duo manage to take Franco-American relations back some two decades with a stream of crass racial slurs. The French are generally restricted to hating America, eating onions and performing the Can-Can. The Chinese don’t get off lightly, either: they all know kung fu, of course, and have funny names.

You will cringe at Tucker’s already well established Michael Jackson impression and other staples of ‘black America’ (which still appears to be lodged somewhere in the 1980s between Eddie Murphy and The Cosby Show), including a scene in which Chan orders fried chicken in memory of his absent sidekick. It all gets very demeaning very quickly, vanquishing what little life was left in this floundering franchise.