Did Donald Trump really ask Hollywood to make ‘Rush Hour 4’?

Donald Trump has been in some movies, but there isn’t much evidence that he actually cares much for cinema. Granted, there isn’t much evidence of him gaining normal-person pleasure at any kind of arts or leisure beyond golf or cable news, but it feels notable that his recent bulldozing of the White House’s East Wing also took out the building’s storied movie theater, which other presidents were known to use with enthusiastic frequency. Can you imagine Trump sitting attentively, watching someone else’s work for two hours? Two hours in the company of something Roger Ebert called an empathy machine?

But maybe the right movie just hasn’t come out yet. And apparently that movie would be Rush Hour 4. According to a report on Semafor, Trump has used his audience with Larry Ellison, whose son David runs Paramount Pictures, to stump for what is apparently one of his most treasured political causes: Making more Rush Hours.

It is admittedly unusual that a wheezy, desperate Rush Hour 4 hasn’t yet been slapped together. The first film was a big surprise hit back in 1998, pairing rising comedian Chris Tucker with Jackie Chan, a longtime action star whose American profile had been recently raised. Say this for Rush Hour: Unlike so many action buddy comedies that take stars who aren’t actually especially funny or physically impressive and send them through a gauntlet of explosions, this one actually does pair a legit comic with a legit martial artist. It’s far from a great movie, but its stars feel genuinely, endearingly mismatched.

Rush Hour 2 was an even bigger hit three years later, and was able to use its leeway as a sequel to up the ante on the action material from Chan, whose American movies rarely match his Hong Kong best. (Tucker, for his part, could really only go louder, but he’s better-integrated into the action, too.) Tucker became relatively reclusive after that, which meant it took six years for Rush Hour 3 to happen, and some of the glow had faded by the summer of 2007. Still, it did well enough, matching the numbers of the first movie (albeit nine years’ worth of inflation later). Three movies, zero flops.

Since then, Tucker has made three (3) movies, all in supporting parts. All prestigious, too; he’s in Silver Linings Playbook, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, and Air, adding David O. Russell, Ang Lee, and Ben Affleck to Quentin Tarantino (Jackie Brown) on the list of directors he’s worked with. He and Chan have both talked about doing Rush Hour 4, but that process may have been slowed not just by Tucker’s scarcity but by the fall-off of one Brett Ratner, whose feature directing career came to a halt about a decade ago following repeated accusations of sexual harassment. Previously, Chan, Tucker, and Ratner were considered the mutually loyal core of any Rush Hour endeavor; presumably the project was a no-go without the Rat-man, which is a nickname I assume someone must have used for this guy at some point. But will there be movement on the project with pressure from the commander in chief?

Semafor frames Trump’s particular interest in Rush Hour as an indicator of the president’s taste for big, loud, macho action-comedies with plenty of broad humor based in racial stereotypes – which, sure, that tracks, in as much as it’s easy to picture Trump paying attention to anything where he isn’t a specific character. (Keep in mind the article reaches back to Bloodsport, a movie from 1987, often cited as a Trump fave simply because he doesn’t say much about movies at all.) I don’t doubt that any influence Trump might exert on Ellison in terms of movies would lean in that direction of being dumb as hell and also pretty tacky, and understand the instinct to read his directive, however informal, as part of a conservative attempt to muscle back into the culture.

But the piece offhands the most likely reason Trump would push for Rush Hour 4. It’s not because he’s hoping Chan will somehow top Drunken Master II with his best sequel yet. It’s not even because he considers Brett Ratner a particularly unfair victim of cancel culture, though that’s getting warmer. It’s because Brett Ratner made a documentary about Trump’s wife, for Amazon, with Melania (an executive producer on the project) receiving most of the $40 million the company paid for the rights. Calling this a grift would be polite; there’s another way of putting it alluding to the circular nature of this arrangement.

So yes, I’m sure Trump would love to reward Brett Ratner for making a presumably flattering documentary about his wife, and that reward might well take the form of Rush Hour 4, especially if he can’t convince Ratner to take on a Phantom of the Opera remake. Of course, Paramount will not have the rights to unless they proceed with buying Warner Bros., a likely and catastrophic outcome of their current “exploration.” So if Rush Hour 4 does materialize in the usual Tucker/Chan/Ratner form, it will be a sign that any number of bad stuff has happened: It will be vastly more likely to happen in a world where Paramount has bought Warner Bros., Brett Ratner is welcomed back into Hollywood despite the repeated sexual harassment allegations, and at least some big studios are taking suggestions from the president about which of his friends they should support.

But that still doesn’t mean Donald Trump is going to sit down and watch it.

Jesse Hassenger (@rockmarooned) is a writer living in Brooklyn. He’s a regular contributor to The A.V. Club, Polygon, and The Week, among others. He podcasts at www.sportsalcohol.com, too.