Rush Hour 2

Of the trio of internationally famous Hong Kong action heroes currently exploring the final frontier of the American box office, Jackie Chan is having the easiest time of it. Chow Yun-Fat and Jet Li may have mastered the English language better, but Chan’s got the universal language of physical comedy on his side. And since setting his sights on Hollywood, the 46-year-old movie star has used his elastic body and knotted tongue with the skills of a U.N. diplomat: Between dispatching tough multiethnic gang members in his 1996 U.S. breakthrough ”Rumble in the Bronx” and confounding drawling white cowboys in his 2000 Western send-up ”Shanghai Noon,” Chan has endeared himself to millions of rainbow-hued, show-me Americans who never thought they’d be nuts for a short Chinese man who can run up walls.

That fan base reached take-notice proportions three years ago, when Chan was first paired with comedian Chris Tucker in ”Rush Hour.” In that unlikely buddy actioner, directed with I’m-down-with-the-homies swagger by Brett Ratner, Chan’s fast Asian feet and charmingly mangled English played to even greater advantage contrasted with Tucker’s fast African-American mouth and whizzy attitudinizing. The two excitable personas, felicitously matched shtick figures, enhanced one another’s strengths and, in the process, solidified their own identities for melting-pot ticket buyers new to either of them. Chan and Tucker personified the jivier, next-generation krazy kops just as the Mel Gibson-Danny Glover ”Lethal Weapon” series was petering out; they were East-meets-West-meets-planet-L.A. in a Benetton world. They weren’t afraid to make post-PC jokes, winking at stereotypes. As an odd couple, they were a hit, and so was the movie.

In other words, make way for ”Rush Hour 2,” which reunites Chan and Tucker for more ah so!/yo bro! adventures. Now that Hong Kong police inspector Lee (Chan) has bonded with LAPD detective James Carter (Tucker), Carter thinks nothing of jetting to Hong Kong for a vacation, counting on Lee to show a brother the sights — which, the tourist hopes, include moo shoo. Moo shoo? You know, moo shoo, as in fine Asian women, some ooh-ooh massage, the full pleasures-of-the-Orient experience any occidental visitor would want — if he’s a caricature of a black man.

In ”Rush Hour 2,” Carter’s the kind of doofus who would tell his host ”I’m gonna bitch-slap you back to Bangkok,” so that later in the story the other doofus can repay the compliment with ”I’ll bitch-slap you back to Africa.” In this coarser, more hectic, more cheaply written sequel, when the two get into a fight with bad guys at a restaurant, Carter gets to complain about ”somebody’s chopsticks shoved up my a– .” And Lee tells rather than shows his appeal by saying ”Women…think I’m cute, like Snoopy.” He also sings along, in his thin tenor voice, to the Beach Boys’ ”California Girls.”

”Rush Hour 2” shifts time zones from Hong Kong to Los Angeles and Las Vegas as Lee and Carter pursue a jet-lagged plot involving John Lone as Ricky Tan, a silky Chinese gang boss with a connection to Lee’s father’s death; Zhang Ziyi as Tan’s personal lethal weapon, a beautiful hitwoman in scarlet lipstick; comedian Alan King as a rich hotel owner, and Puerto Rican beauty-pageant winner Roselyn Sanchez as a U.S. Secret Service agent. And it’s clearly a credit to the moneymaking muscle of the first ”Rush” that the original crossover Chinese hunk, Lone (”The Last Emperor”), and the newest crossover Asian beauty, Zhang (”Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon”) choose to grace this endeavor. (Even charismatic Don Cheadle drops in, in an unbilled cameo as a black martial artist with a pigtail.)

As Lee and Carter chase a transatlantic counterfeiting and money-smuggling ring, fend off inventive attackers, and school each other in interracial harmony (”Lionel Richie,” Carter declares in a zinger that sounds like pure Tucker, rather than from the strained script credited to Jeff Nathanson, ”ain’t been black since the Commodores”), ”Rush Hour 2” approaches gridlock. With Chan’s post-40 physical machinery beginning to slow down (in one fleeting, endearing admission of aging, Lee needs Carter to flip him off the floor so he can live to fight some more), the choreography, while still delightful, is inevitably less intricate.

But that’s no reason for the cross-cultural comedy to go flabby, too. On the contrary, the repartee should have been buffed. ”He won’t be in ‘Rush Hour 3,’ ” Tucker jokes about a stuntman whose blooper makes it into the traditional Jackie Chan closing-credit outtakes, his eye on the franchise. As the fortune cookie says, Hollywood fools rush in where Asians fear to tread.