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RUSH HOUR 2

Well, here's my answer. For starters, they've taken almost as much material as those multi-disc sets and compressed them onto one disc. They've also created a handier way to present supplements - similar to ideas used for other discs, but somehow a bit better organized.

This organization is very helpful to those seeking more information about movies like this one that have so many varying facets. Plus, they packaged it in a bright red plastic case.

The sequel re-unites stars Jackie Chan and Chris Tucker with director Brett Ratner (and composer Lalo Schifrin, etc.) for an adventure that is bigger, funnier and more exciting than the first. At least, that's the intention. And with a few reservations, that's the result as well.

There's also a lot more plot. We find L.A. cop Carter (Tucker) a few days after the end of the original (but three years older) on vacation in Hong Kong, though he's perturbed that his new friend Inspector Lee (Chan) is too busy chasing crooks to show him a good time in his hometown. Instead, they find themselves investigating the deaths of two American customs agents killed in a bombing. Among the prime suspects is Lee's father's ex-partner Ricky Tan (John Lone from THE SHADOW), who is now a big shot in the triads. Before the pair can get any evidence on Tan, he's shot in front of their eyes by his enforcer Hu Li (CROUCHING TIGER's Zhang Ziyi).

Following nothing more than a hunch, the pair head for L.A., tailing suspicious billionaire and Tan associate Steven Reign (Alan King). There, a gorgeous undercover Secret Service agent (Roselyn Sanchez) informs them that behind it all is a plot involving the legendary counterfeit "Superbill." Before they can act on this information, the boys are captured and put on a truck full of the phony cash headed for Las Vegas, leading to the expected climactic mayhem in a casino.

While much of Tucker's loudmouth antics could be written off as ignorance in the first film, here we expect his friendship with Lee to have imbued him with a bit more wisdom, so it's a bit more grating to have him spouting off constantly again here. And Lee's tolerance of Carter's racism makes one uncomfortable, though he gives it as well as he takes it in several scenes - at one point telling his friend he'll "bitch-slap him back to Africa." What helps the film float over these rough patches is its light atmosphere, more similar to the Hope & Crosby "Road" pictures than most buddy action flicks. These movies are meant to please a family audience, so the violence and language is sugarcoated to go down easy.

Brett Ratner again proves his worth more as a manager than a visionary, letting Chan and his team create the action scenes, letting Tucker riff endlessly to get the best lines, and relying on top designers and technical people to work wonders, then bringing it all together. The DVD is an encyclopedia of RUSH HOUR 2, and throughout the extras we get a detailed portrait of Ratner's liquid method of constructing a film, using everything at his disposal as raw material.

While Infinifilmä allows the viewer access to a wealth of extras via menus, much of it can be taken in while watching the movie with the Infinifilmä subtitle track. The film can be viewed with a fine commentrak by Ratner and "credited screenwriter" Jeff Nathanson, with POP-UP VIDEO style trivia subtitles, or with Infinifilmä, which displays a small menu of links at intervals throughout the film that lead to a variety of extras. These range from filmographies to featurettes to outtakes, after which you're returned to the film at the same point. The best of these comes late in the show: a longer clip showing how the cast and crew had to come up with a more spectacular ending together on the set, with an exhausted Ratner actually falling asleep in the middle of it all.

There are still a few bugs to be worked out of the system, but overall I enjoyed accessing features this way much better than the conventional surfing-through-menus way. One annoying bug is that choosing "play movie" from the main menu doesn't let you toggle to the subtitle options - you have to choose Infinifilmä from a separate menu. Another problem is that sometimes the menus fail to highlight the needed links when they appear. However, the link menus are set at the chapter marks, so I got around that by simply skipping back to the start of the chapters, which brought up the highlights. Going beyond the disc instructions, I chose to save time by watching the film with the commentrak, trivia subtitles and Infinifilmä all running at once, which was a lot of fun. It takes over three hours to get through the film this way, but it's better than watching it three separate times.

There's also a bunch of extras not linked to the Infinifilmä track, including trailers, documentary clips, DVD-ROM material - everything you'll ever want to know about RUSH HOUR 2. Among all this I found an expected Easter Egg: a trailer for FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING. New Line - and authoring house Laser Pacific - is to be congratulated for this attempt to upgrade and refresh the whole DVD experience.

The only bit of information I couldn't find was why this series is called RUSH HOUR. I heard a rumor that an early version of the first film's plot had a lot of Jackie Chan fighting bad guys while stuck in a typical L.A. traffic jam, but that idea disappeared throughout a long series of rewrites, so what gives?