TV reviews

 

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, CBS
In the UK: Acquired by E4. Begins 9pm, April 19 (probably)

The original Rush Hour, a 1998 action comedy in which black US cop Chris Tucker forges an unlikely buddy-buddy relationship with Chinese cop Jackie Chan, was a huge hit, earning US$244m at the box office as well as two sequels. The big mystery was why. Why was this most average of movies such a big hit?

Tucker, after all, is a candidate for an award for ‘most annoying human being on the face of the planet’.

Chan, of course, is great. Or at least was, back in his 1980s Hong Kong heyday. But in Rush Hour, older and, as with most Asian action cinema stars In Western movies, slower, he’s not that impressive. He’s still Jackie Chan but he’s no Drunken Master any more, certainly.

Then there’s the script, which is borderline offensive most of the time.

And lastly (well, I could go on, but I won’t) there’s Brett Ratner’s average direction, Ratner as we’ve already established being the world’s most average director. Rush Hour in no way disproved this theory.

It’s just blah. So why so popular? I can only assume that it was either Chan’s mere presence in a movie or the fact it had a black and an Asian lead, was enough to make audience hungry for such mainstream rarities willing to watch pretty much anything – much like men in deserts with nothing to drink for days will imbibe almost anything they’re given, even Irn Bru.

If only there were a way to test.

Guess what. There is. It’s Rush Hour, CBS’s ‘reimagining’ of the original movie. Again, why bother, given how average the original was? I’m not sure, but that boat has sailed already. It’s here. Now we have to deal with it as it puts into port.

Rush Hour the series sees London’s own Jon Foo (from Jackie Chan’s own House of Fury) in the Chan role of a Hong Kong detective coming over to the US to investigate the theft of some terracotta soldiers on loan to a Los Angeles museum… as well as the murder of his cop sister. He’s partnered with LAPD detective Justin Hires (21 Jump Street) and wouldn’t you know it, there’s a clash of cultures, as the straight-laced Foo has to deal with Americans and their way informal ways, Hires having to adapt to the Chinese habit of kicking everyone else in the head every 10 minutes. Together they have to form a partnership to take down the bad guys, and wouldn’t you know, it by the end of the pilot episode, they’re partners for real.

Now you’d think that bereft of Tucker and Ratner, the Rush Hour format could only get better. But no. While Hires isn’t even a fraction as annoying as Tucker, he’s an appalling and uncharismatic actor. His dialogue might not be as overtly racist as Tucker’s was in the movie, but appropriately enough, he still sounds like he’s been given a black 90s stand-up’s lines (“You see white people? They go like this… You see black people? They go like this…”).

Meanwhile, it’s a little unclear whether Foo is simply taking “stiff and formal” a little too literally and behaving like he’s made of formica or if he simply can’t act. To his credit, he’s clearly a good martial artist, but he’s only technically good, capable of hurting people fluidly, but not charismatic or entertaining. Despite one or two attempts to go full Hong Kong with props, this is certainly not the new Martial Law.

It’s not even Into The Badlands.

Otherwise, despite the CBS budget, this is straight to syndication B-material, the sort of thing that makes you yearn for the days of The Adventures of Sinbad and Queen of Swords. No one’s trying very hard with the plot or the action scenes, the dialogue tries to be a bit racist but its heart isn’t really in it, and the supporting cast are more watchable than the leads but only just.

It’s not terrible: you can have it flicking across your TV screen, grabbing 8% of your attention while you do a crossword or repot some plants, and you won’t feel motivated to slit your own throat or even change channel. But there’s literally nothing to recommend it, nothing for you to highlight as a reason to watch it if anyone asks.

So if it succeeds, I think we can put it down to the scarcity of stories with black and Asian leads; if it fails, we can all appreciate how even on his worst day, Jackie Chan was just box office dynamite.

In the US: Thursdays, 10/9c, ABC
In the UK: Acquired by Sky Living, for a probable May broadcast

Most art, particularly the hard-boiled kind, has been created by men. As a result, the femme fatale, that irresistibly alluring bad girl who leads the hero astray, is an established archetype throughout literature and movies. Think Lauren Bacall in The Big Sleep… if you want. I’ll be thinking of Sharon Stone in practically anything, particularly Basic Instinct where she played Catherine Tramell, whose name quite literally is a synonym for entrapment. 

But with women’s art increasingly recognised and women more often in a position of power, we’re seeing the increasing presence of the femme fatale’s male counterpart – the homme fatal, a term so obscure until now you have to go to the French wikipedia to even find it spelt correctly, and even then, it’s actually only the French title of Fanny By Gaslight. 

More commonly, you’ll find him referred to as the more manly ‘bad boy’ – you could probably write a thesis about why this should be – and such is the nature of the beast, he’s largely to be found in the fantasy and horror genre: think Angel in Buffy The Vampire Slayer or Edward in Twilight. He’s the sexy, elusive, frequently taciturn man of dubious virtue who sends the heroine off the rails and into a tail-spin. Like the femme fatale, he’s the one you f*ck, not marry; but unlike the femme fatale, he’ll probably fall in love with the heroine along the way.

Just as not every beautiful woman can be a femme fatale, not every handsome man can be an homme fatal. It takes a certain something more. A certain je ne sais quoi. Which is presumably why there’s been so much recasting on The Catch, ABC’s latest attempt to appeal to its predominantly female demographic through the all-powerful magic of Shonda Rhimes being cast on an homme fatal. I’m pretty sure it still hasn’t worked, though.

It stars Mireille Enos (The Killing (US), World War Z) as one of LA’s top private investigators, looking after the security for numerous big firms. She seems to have it all – a great business, great friends, great clothes, great house, a great taste in everything and a great fiancé (Peter Krause from The Lost Room, Dirty Sexy Money and Parenthood). Unfortunately, one of those turns out to be significantly less great than previously suspected. Have a guess which one?

Yes, it’s Krause. He’s actually a conman who’s trying to liberate all manner of things from Enos, except her spinsterhood, before he legs it with his real love (Sonya Walger from Lost, FlashForward, and Common Law). Will Enos discover what he’s up to before it’s too late and he breaks her business and her heart? No. Obviously not. Short show if she does. Instead, Enos has to do all she can recover her losses, save her business and catch Krause before FBI investigator Jacky Ido (Taxi Brooklyn) discovers everything.

As I said, there’s been a lot of recasting. Here’s the original cast picture:

You’ll notice that Walger was originally Bethany Joy Lenz and Krause was Damon Dayoub. You can see them in action in the original pilot episode.

Since then, the show’s been retooled quite substantially. Gone is the noirish tale of angsty fraud investigator having doubts about her marriage who’s duped by a bad boy; now we’re getting some Shondaland kick ass fun – and a whole new man:

Harking back to that thesis I mentioned earlier, there was apparently either too little homme fatal to Dayoub and he wasn’t considered ‘substantial’ enough to be irresistible to Enos or there was too much to him and he was considered too sexy for prime time. Alternatively, it might be he was even thought too young for her – femmes fatales are almost always younger, hommes fatals are almost always older, of course.

Whatever the reason, in this all-new The Catch, Krause and Enos’s relationship is now a bit more Thomas Crown Affair, right down to the split-screen storytelling. Krause is ambivalent about the con against Enos and might well have fallen in love with her, having reservations about Walger who’s now the driving force in both their relationship and their con.

What’s surprising about the retooling is that the new first episode pretty much wraps everything up. You wonder where the show’s going to go next. By the looks of it, it’s going to be The Thomas Crowne Affair every week, with Krause, Walger and their partner in crime Alimi Ballard (Numb3rs) pulling another light-hearted con against one of Enos’ clients that Enos has to then stop, making Krause wonder if he’s actually in love with her and Enos having to resist his pull. 

Stapled onto that in a way that makes Women’s Murder Club‘s ‘corridor of truth’ look like seamless story-telling is all the sitting around, talking about boys.

The question is will you have a fatal attraction to The Catch? Probably not. While there is a lightness and simplicity to it that’s welcome after the likes of How To Get Away With Murder, it’s not in the slightest bit convincing. Krause is a lot of things, after all, and was great in The Lost Room. He’s also fun to watch and good at comedy. But an homme fatal? No. Sorry.

Enos is sparky and her job is thankfully a bit more dynamic than the usual mousey librarian with imposter syndrome that the genre requires. But she’s taking everything a bit too seriously for us to really enjoy watching her and, like much of the show, the idea of a super-rich security firm that has access to all its clients’ bank accounts is as crazy as a wardrobe full of screaming gibbons – the writers have to add dialogue at every point to patch up each blindingly obvious loophole they’ve just created.

The Catch is not the worst thing you’ll ever see, but unfortunately, despite some interesting ambitions, it’s unlikely to ever steal your attention, let alone your heart.