If you have a good formula, why mess with it? The sequel to Rush Hour sees Tucker and Chan reprising their roles as an LAPD police detective and Hong Kong Chief Inspector, respectively. They reused a lot of jokes from the first movie, but this time instead of Tucker saying them to Chan, Chan said them to Tucker. There was considerably more action in this film than the first one which was pretty action-packed. This time out they dispensed with long dialogues and any scenes with Tucker or Chan at their respective police stations that weren't also action scenes.
While they didn't have Pena back to reprise her role, they did have the third part of their time played by a Latina actor, Rosalyn Sanchez. She played an undercover Secret Service agent who got quite a bit more screen time than her counterpart in the first film. That was due in no small part to her being an attractive woman that both male leads are interested in, and in no less of a small part due to the main villain's lieutenant being a woman, played by Zhang Ziyi hot off her role in Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon. Both women got to do multiple action scenes, including, of course, a fight with each other during the climax of the film.
At one point in the film, Carter (Tucker) says to Lee (Chan), "The key to solving a crime is to follow the rich guy. There is always a rich white guy waiting for his piece of the action." And that right there seems to be the formula for these movies laid out in a nutshell. Minority heroes must thwart a rich white villain. I suppose minority is only applicable watching these films in the U.S. and then only in the socio-historical context of the term. Jackie Chan is certainly not a minority in Hong Kong or China. I've got not problem with this formula. I think it's probably true more often than not, and if you say just that's it a rich man behind the plot, I think you'll be very assured of being correct, at least as it applies to these large kinds of crimes.
Rush Hour 2 on IMDb
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