Brett Ratner, who directed Tucker in the 1997 comedy Money Talks, mounts the caper smartly; the kidnapping scene is a model mix of suspense, comedy (the kid puts up a good fight) and technical facility. Ratner also stirs a good rapport between the stars: Chris all flailing sass, Jackie the image of stalwart exasperation--when he's not talking down and dirty to Tucker's black friends, or grunting along with the old Edwin Starr anthem War: "Huh! Yeah!" Does the film stoop to racial stereotype? Yes, as many Hong Kong action films do: broadly and without malice. "He's he and I'm me," says Tucker of Chan. "He's a real cool person, and he trusted me, so it all worked out, the comedy and the karate together."

The stars also worked out together. "I did like 300 sit-ups," Tucker insists, with a roguish laugh, "and I think Jackie stopped at about 50." Chan thinks that Tucker's rapid street banter, a key to Rush Hour's U.S. success, is a reason the film confounds some Asian audiences. "At the premiere in Taiwan," he says, "they just sit like"--and he puts on the stone face of incomprehension and displeasure. "They cannot catch the American jokes. Even the translators can't keep up. After 10 minutes, they just put a subtitle: 'How are you?'"

What lifts Rush Hour above Chan's earlier stabs at American assimilation is that it lets Jackie do his uniquely nimble stunt magic with minimum interference. Ratner knows that, for Jackie, there's no building ledge too high, no comedy too low. In one funny fight, he must kick beaucoup butt while keeping precious vases from toppling and breaking. Some of the stunt gags are filched from Jackie's own 1985 Police Story (he jumps onto a double-decker bus, he dangles from the top of a mall space), but, if you're going to steal, why not from the best? In the most graceful piece, Jackie hangs from a Hollywood Boulevard street sign, then drops onto a truck, rolls off and slips into and out of a jitney, slides across the top of a taxi and in through the back seat window--all in 15 seconds.

Chan not only choreographed the stunt, he chose the street sign. "The director had me hanging off a Sunset Boulevard sign," he recalls, "and I asked him if I could change it to a Hollywood sign. That sign has meaning to the Chinese. It's like I grab Hollywood. If the movie opened at only $1 million in the U.S., I would have let go. But now I'm happy. It says: Hollywood, I've come back."

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