Amazingly, director Brett Ratner doesn't appear to have learned a damn thing. "Rush Hour 2" seems like it should have been on television and was probably made with the pan-and-scan video release in mind (a high aspiration indeed). Sure, the story is a little different: This time Inspector Lee (Jackie Chan) and Det. James Carter (Chris Tucker) start in Hong Kong. They follow Ricky Tan (John Lowe) and his assistant Hu Li (Ziyi Zhang) and end up in the middle of a counterfeiting ring, which takes them back to Los Angeles and Las Vegas.

Predictably, Carter makes fun of Lee and the Chinese and Lee makes fun of Carter and black people. Jackie Chan gets to do martial arts while Chris Tucker gets to run his mouth. Chris Tucker even gets to beat Ziyi Zhang in a fight, despite the fact that he knows virtually no martial arts. That's just the way it goes in films like this one. Frankly, I don't know why they even bothered with a story. The movie would be equally entertaining if it were just a sequence of fights and one-liners that weren't connected by any particular thread.

Do sequels mean that Hollywood is hopelessly bereft of creativity, or that the people of America are morons who ultimately demand this kind of crap by paying to see it? If you plan to see this movie, give it some thought, and try not to sprain anything in the process.