In most ways, the last six years have not been a good six years. Donald Trump's ego has inflated to a size that threatens to grow beyond our universe, the Tour de France has become the Tour de Dope, and Britney Spears has made Joan Crawford look like a nominee for "Mother of the Year."

However, one way in which the last six years has been very good to me is that I haven't had to watch a single movie starring Chris Tucker. Frankly, this makes up for all that other crap. I've often sat around the house bemoaning the state of the world only to emerge with a feeling of complete euphoria after reminding myself that Chris Tucker has not appeared in a film since "Rush Hour 2" in 2001. Hallelujah!

Alas, Tucker is back in "Rush Hour 3" and perhaps Armageddon is indeed upon us. For those of you who don't remember, Tucker is that comedian who's kind of like Eddie Murphy after inhaling the contents of a parade float. Tucker teams with Jackie Chan to form the duo of Detective James Carter of the LAPD and Chief Inspector Lee of the Hong Kong police. Together they fight crime, kick butt, and make lots of simultaneous jokes about Asians and African-Americans whose net racist effect is supposed to be zero apparently.

Do give director Brett Ratner some credit. After making "After the Sunset" and taking a giant, steaming crap on the "X-Men" franchise with "X-Men: The Last Stand", Brett has taken on the challenge of making another "Rush Hour" movie, his third.

The word of the day in this film is "formula": See the briefest glimpse of a plot. See Jackie Chan jump about. See Chris Tucker comment inanely. See them both joke with each other. Repeat. "Rush Hour 3" takes our heroes to Paris where they try to discover the secret of the Triad mob and why it shot Consul Han (Tzi Ma). Standing in their way is Triad bad guy Kenji (Hiroyuki Sanada), Varden Reynard (Max von Sydow), a pissy French taxi driver (Yvan Attal) and Detective Revi (Roman Polanski). Each shows up to accelerate the plot like a pinball hitting a bumper.

Back to Chris Tucker: His voice has all the charm of fingernails being dragged across a chalkboard. His sole purpose in the movie is to provide a sort of unwanted running commentary on various actions as though he's watching it from another location.

There's a reason that it took six years to make another "Rush Hour" movie. Nobody was interested - and with good reason.